Playing like it hadn’t seen its home fans in more than a month, the Hawaii women’s basketball team made quick work of Cal State Bakersfield on Thursday.
Lily Wahinekapu led all scorers with 15 points and had seven rebounds, and all 10 Rainbow Wahine who played more than two minutes scored from the field in a 67-43 victory over the Roadrunners at SimpliFi Arena at Stan Sheriff Center.
A crowd of 641 welcomed the team back for its first home game since Dec. 3 and second since Thanksgiving weekend.
Hawaii won back-to-back games for the first time all season to improve to 5-6 overall and 2-0 in conference play, joining UC Irvine and Cal Poly as the only schools without a conference loss in the second week of the season.
“It’s nice when we can come out in the first quarter and play the way we did, ” said Hawaii coach Laura Beeman, whose team led 21-5 after the opening 10 minutes. “We wanted to come out and kind of lower the boom a little bit. I felt it in the locker room they were excited and ready to play and were ready to be back on their home court.”
Imani Perez had 10 points on 2-for-3 shooting and was a perfect 6-for-6 from the free-throw line as Hawaii shot 85.7 % (12-for-14 ) from the charity stripe.
Daejah Phillips, who missed the Rainbow Wahine’s win over Cal State Fullerton on Saturday, led Hawaii with a season-high 10 rebounds and added seven points and three assists.
She helped the Rainbow Wahine outrebound the Roadrunners 41-30.
“Box out and take pride in it. It’s really who wants it. Box out and go get it, ” Phillips said. “I didn’t really box out that much today. I was kind of just jumping over everyone, but the emphasis in our locker room is rebound, rebound, rebound.”
Hawaii’s post players all fared well inside the paint. Junior Brooklyn Rewers had nine points, four rebounds and three blocks and freshman center Vivienne Berrett celebrated her birthday with a career-high seven points on 3-for-4 shooting in eight minutes off the bench.
“I felt like we had a pretty big advantage (inside ), ” Berrett said. “They started off with their big girl, but they started to go small, and that made it easier for us to get position inside.”
The Roadrunners had to go small after Hawaii blitzed them from the opening whistle.
Olivia Davies, MeiLani McBee and Rewers connected on 3-pointers to start the scoring and Berrett powered her way to consecutive baskets in the paint after the first media timeout to finish a 15-2 run through the opening 6-plus minutes.
Julia Riley answered with a 3-pointer for Cal State Bakersfield, but Hawaii closed out the quarter with 3s by Ashley Thoms and Jade Peacock to give five different Rainbow Wahine a make from behind the arc in the first 10 minutes.
UH took its largest lead of the first half into intermission when Phillips followed up her own miss on a fallaway jumper with an offensive rebound and putback to give the Rainbow Wahine a 36-14 lead.
Perez, UH’s leading scorer entering the game, registered her first field goal on a putback at the buzzer at the end of the third quarter to give UH a 52-26 lead.
Cal State Bakersfield stayed with Hawaii in the second half and outscored the Rainbow Wahine 17-15 in the fourth quarter but never got the deficit under 20 over the final 16 minutes.
“We’ve had a struggle maintaining those leads, so to keep (a 20-point ) lead throughout, that’s hard to do, ” Beeman said. “We have to adapt better when teams go small because I don’t want to have to adapt to what we do. I don’t want to take our bigs out. I want our bigs to play better against smaller (lineups ).”
Shaunae Brown had 13 points to lead Cal State Bakersfield (4-8, 1-2 ), which shot 27.1 % (16-for-59 ) from the field.
It was the third time in four games Hawaii held an opponent to fewer than 50 points.
UH will host Cal State Northridge (2-10, 0-2 ) next tonight at 7 p.m.
