The University of Hawai’i women’s basketball team is set to begin its final Big West Conference road trip, facing UC Riverside on Thursday, March 5 at SRC Arena in Riverside, California. The game will start at 6 p.m. Pacific Time (4 p.m. Hawai’i Time) and will be available via live stream on ESPN+.
Following the matchup with UC Riverside, the Rainbow Wahine will close out their regular season against Long Beach State on Saturday, March 7 at the LBS Financial Credit Union Pyramid. The team will then head to Henderson, Nevada for the Credit Union 1 Big West Basketball Championship.
Hawai’i enters this week tied for fourth place in the Big West standings after winning 12 of their last 13 games, including a six-game winning streak that matches their longest run of the season. The third and fourth seeds in the conference tournament receive byes into the quarterfinals.
Head coach Laura Beeman has led the program to a record of 240-179 over her 14 seasons. Under her leadership, Hawai’i recently broke its single-season record for blocked shots with a new total of 167, surpassing the previous mark of 163 set in the 2002-03 season. The team leads the Big West and ranks seventh nationally with an average of six blocks per game.
Freshman guard Bailey Flavell continues to lead Hawai’i in scoring with an average of 13 points per game and is positioned to become the first freshman since the 2010-11 season to top the team’s scoring chart.
Senior Saniyah Neverson has improved her performance late in her final season, averaging a team-high 14 points and seven rebounds during Hawai’i’s current win streak. She has also maintained a field goal percentage of nearly 59% over this period.
Imani Perez, another senior forward, anchors Hawai’i’s defense as she leads the conference with an average of 1.63 blocked shots per game and is ranked nationally in this category as well. Offensively, Perez holds shooting percentages of almost 48% from the field and just under 45% from three-point range.
Hawai’i’s defense ranks second in field-goal percentage allowed within the Big West and has moved up to eleventh nationally by holding opponents to just over 35% shooting. In addition, they have limited their last fourteen opponents to under sixty points per game while leading the conference in scoring defense at just over fifty-seven points allowed per contest.
The Rainbow Wahine are allowing only about fifty-one points per game during their current win streak while restricting opponents’ shooting percentages to just above thirty-two percent.
This year marks Hawai’i’s final season competing in the Big West before moving to join the Mountain West Conference beginning with the next academic year.
In Thursday’s matchup, UH leads UC Riverside in all-time meetings by an eighteen-to-nine margin but lost their most recent encounter earlier this year when Hannah Wickstrom scored thirty-six points for UCR—the Highlanders’ first win in Honolulu since 2019. Wickstrom currently leads both her team and ranks fifth nationally with an average of more than twenty-three points per game; she also tops UCR’s rebounding and steals statistics.
UC Riverside is locked into seventh place for next week’s conference tournament as they host UH for what will be their regular-season finale under head coach Brad Langston.
