ASSOCIATED PRESS
Hawaii's Lily Kahumoku and her teammates will get their first taste of the UH-BYU rivalry.
PROVO, Utah.>> The last time these two teams met, they made history. But in recent years, their history has had a minor gap until today. Ready for another rivalry
By Grace Wen
gwen@starbulletin.comIn freezing and drafty Smith Fieldhouse, No. 2 Hawaii and Brigham Young rekindle a rivalry at 4 p.m. Hawaii time.
When Hawaii and Brigham Young last played against each other, the year was 1998 and the Western Athletic Conference had not been severed. Both teams were the winners of their respective divisions in the 16-team WAC. In the regular season, the Rainbow Wahine lost to the Cougars in Provo and then defeated them in the second round in Honolulu. The final in Las Vegas was a match for the ages, eventually won by Hawaii 15-12, 21-19, 13-15, 16-18, 24-22.
"It was probably the best match I've ever been involved in," Hawaii coach Dave Shoji said. "It had everything. The teams were well matched. It kept going back and forth."
In the postgame press conference, Shoji and then-BYU head coach Elaine Michaelis were saying it was the best match they had ever coached. That says a lot when you consider there are 80 years of coaching experience between the two.
Associate coach Charlie Wade remembers players that came off the court and were literally collapsing in the timeouts. And when the whistle blew, the players had to drag themselves back onto the court.
The Rainbow Wahine and Cougars have not played each other since. The epic three-hour and 38-minute match is in the NCAA record book as the longest in history.
"I played for a long time. I've coached for a long time and it was the greatest thing I've ever been involved in," said BYU coach Karen Lamb, who was Michaelis' assistant at the time. "We were in the locker room after Game 2 and I was looking at the clock. I thought it was wrong. It didn't seem like each game took an hour.
"It was a great battle between two really good teams. It took everything we had. It hurt us because it was such a battle. It was the culminating game of all time for our team. It was such a great match."
Rally scoring has seen to it that no match will ever go that long again but even without the scoring system, today's match shouldn't be anywhere as long.
It's been ridiculously rough first year for Lamb. An injury-plagued season has reduced BYU's roster of 14 to nine and only recently has it gone back up to 11 active players. BYU's 14-17 record indicates the kind of season it has had. The Cougars have had almost double the number of losses that they had last season and their sub .500 record ensures that BYU won't get an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament.
The Cougars picked up a little bit of momentum over the weekend when it advanced to the Mountain West Conference championship last Saturday. The Cougars eliminated top-seeded Colorado State 3-2 in the semifinals but lost 3-0 to Utah in the final.
"We were determined to win the tournament so we could go to NCAAs," Lamb said. "We're not as healthy as we need to be but team morale is good."
Though there are no remaining players on either side who are linked to the epic match, a few Hawaii players will see a familiar face on the other side of the net today.
BYU's Uila Crabbe was the starting setter for juniors Lily Kahumoku and Nohea Tano during Kamehameha's vaunted state championship runs from 1998-2000. Crabbe is a defensive specialist for the Cougars.
UH Athletics
