Sjarif Goldstein: Warrior volleyball team’s load not as heavy for today’s title game

It’s almost as if the past year has been building up to today.

The University of Hawaii men’s volleyball team faces UC Irvine for the national championship, and a win before what has proven to be a “home” crowd, even 2,500 miles away in Los Angeles, would be the crowning achievement in what has been one of the greatest UH sports years in quite some time.

The football program had its best year since maybe the Sugar Bowl season in 2007, capping a 9-4 campaign with a dramatic Hawaii Bowl win over California, as Timmy Chang is showing he might make an even bigger imprint on the program as a coach than he did as a record-setting quarterback.

The men’s basketball team made its first appearance in the NCAA Tournament in 10 seasons by winning the Big West Tournament after finishing second in its last season before moving to the historically more rigorous Mountain West Conference, which has been a multi-bid league in most recent years, even if most of those schools are leaving to join a nine-team Pac-12.

The women’s basketball team recovered from a slow start to come within a win of the NCAAs in one of the most impressive coaching efforts of Laura Beeman’s consistently great tenure, as she helped a team that lost nearly two-thirds of its scoring weather those early struggles and finish the year as one of the league strongest and deepest teams.

The softball team finished second in the Big West before a pair of narrow losses ended the Rainbow Wahine’s season last week, but most importantly it made an apparently seamless transition from the retirement of loooooooongtime head coach Bob Coolen to new skipper Panita Thanatharn.

Thanks to years of good hiring, UH athletics appears to be in the best shape its been in in years, and it almost lowers the stakes for today’s final — not for the team mind you, as none of this year’s players were on those back-to-back NCAA champions of 2021-22.

But for fans, those two titles, and the program’s steady excellence, take away a lot of the downside. Besides those two championship victories, this is a team that coach Charlie Wade will have in the season-ending Top 10 for the 10th straight year. A loss today to an excellent UC Irvine team would not be devastating for most fans.