First-year Hawaii women’s basketball coach Laura Beeman told it like it was — brutally — during her team’s slog through two difficult early-season tournaments.

On the other side of a 27-day layoff from official games, little has changed in that regard. UH (2-6) takes on another challenging overall field in the three-day Bank of Hawaii Invitational starting today at 7 p.m. vs. LIU Brooklyn (3-5) at the Stan Sheriff Center.

Power conference teams Cincinnati (7-3) and Alabama (7-3) promise to provide stiff competition through the weekend before the Rainbow Wahine hit Big West Conference play on the road next Thursday.

"Optimistic? Yeah, we could win three games this weekend," Beeman said. "Will that happen? I don’t know if we’re ready for that. But by the time the tournament’s over, we’re going to be ready for conference."

To recap some of Beeman’s challenges so far: Four of the six Wahine losses have come against teams currently in the Top 25, including No. 1 Stanford and No. 3 Baylor. UH’s last win was Nov. 23 against Oregon, and its last real game was on Dec. 1, a one-point loss to 9-1 Utah.

UH was rusty in its last outing 10 days ago, a 72-62 exhibition win over Hawaii Pacific in which the Wahine trailed by a point at halftime. That contest was added to help break up the monotony of having all practices and no games through most of December. It might have helped, but that was also before much of the team went home for Christmas.

The Wahine executed two-a-day practices on Wednesday and Thursday to get themselves up to speed for their last of three nonconference, round-robin tourneys.

"Thankfully we have two-a-days to get some things out of our system, hopefully shake off as much rust as we can," said senior point guard Monica DeAngelis, who has a team-high seven 3-pointers. "We’re really looking forward to executing things that we’ve been learning in practice the last 17 days we had off leading up to HPU. We’ve been preparing for these teams and preparing for conference. So we’re really looking forward to it."

Beeman finally has all her active players back, leaving her some leeway this weekend to experiment with a rotation and starting lineup she likes going into the BWC.

UH’s primary contributors to this point have been junior forward Kamilah Martin (team-bests of 15.8 points, 9.9 rebounds, 17 assists and 10 steals), versatile freshman Destiny King (9.1 ppg, 5.1 rpg, 83.3 percent on free throws) and redshirt freshman wing Ashleigh Karaitiana (8.8 ppg, 5.5 rpg).

Junior wings Vicky Tagalicod and Shawna Kuehu are still feeling out their roles coming off early-season injuries, while sophomore center Kalei Adolpho will play her first official game under Beeman now that the UH volleyball season is over.

"I definitely want to see some rotations that make sense and are consistent," Beeman said. "And then we’ll really be able to see where our offense and defense falls."

She added the starting lineup will change depending on the matchup and players’ practice productivity.

"There will be some continuity among the lack of continuity, if you will," the coach said.

Cincinnati and Alabama kick off the tourney today at 4:30 p.m.