All-Big West Awards (.pdf) >>>
HENDERSON, Nev. (March 7, 2022) - Regular-season league champion Hawai’i has had its program pick up two of the three major awards featured among the 2021-22 Big West women’s basketball all-conference teams. Amy Atwell, a graduate student and forward, is The Big West Player of the Year, with the Rainbow Wahine’s Laura Beeman the Coach of the Year for the second time. Cal State Fullerton’s Lily Wahinekapu has been chosen as the Freshman of the Year. The conference’s 11 head coaches voted for the awards.

Atwell, a product of South Perth, Australia, was the catalyst behind UH’s run to The Big West regular-season title in her sixth and final year in the program. The team’s only player to start all 26 games, she tops the conference with a 17.9 scoring average, having poured in a career-high 466 points to give her 1,193 as a collegian. She is also seventh in rebounding (6.6 per game) and field goal percentage (.444), third in free throw percentage (.848), second in three-pointers made per game (2.4), sixth in three-point percentage (.375), tied for 10th in steals per game (1.5), and tied for 11th in blocks per game (0.6). Atwell posted the second-best scoring effort of this campaign around The Big West, when she went for 33 in a home win over CSU Bakersfield on Jan. 22. She had one other 30-point game, led the league with 11 20-point performances, posted five double-doubles, and hit seven triples in a game twice. Atwell is just the second Big West Player of the Year in program history, and first in over three decades, since Judy Mosley in 1989-90.

In her milestone 10th season at the helm, Beeman has led UH to marks of 17-9 overall and 13-3 in conference play. Controlling their own destiny heading into the final week of the regular season, Beeman guided the Rainbow Wahine to a pair of home wins to clinch the outright Big West regular-season crown. They were picked fifth in the preseason poll. UH boasts the league’s second-best scoring offense at 65.1 points per game, and shoots a conference-leading 33.7 percent from three-point range. Beeman’s squad enters the postseason as winners of five straight and 10 of their last 11. She was previously The Big West Coach of the Year in 2014-15, which marked the program’s last regular-season title.

Wahinekapu, a true freshman guard out of Honolulu, Hawaii, averaged a team-best 14.5 points per game for Cal State Fullerton in her first collegiate go-around, fifth in The Big West. She was also fourth in assists per game (3.7), sixth in assist-to-turnover ratio (1.2) and steals per game (1.7), 10th in free throw percentage (.772), and 11th in field goal percentage (.398). Wahinekapu tied for the fifth-most 20-point games in the league with five, registering a high of 27. She also picked up All-Big West honorable mention for her efforts. Wahinekapu is the Titans’ first Freshman of the Year since Lauren Chow in 2007-08. 

The other five members of the All-Big West First Team with Atwell are UC Riverside’s Keilanei Cooper, UC Davis’ Cierra Hall, UC Santa Barbara’s Danae Miller and Long Beach State’s Maddi Utti, all seniors, as well as UC Irvine redshirt freshman Kayla Williams. Atwell made the second team a year ago after earning All-Big West honorable mention for the 2019-20 campaign. Hall was the 2020-21 Player of the Year and thus is a back-to-back first-teamer, as is Williams, the 2020-21 Freshman of the Year. Cooper was on the second team a year ago. Hall made the second team in 2019-20, with Miller earning honorable mentions in 2018-19 and 2019-20.

Wahinekapu is joined on The Big West All-Freshman Team by UC Irvine teammates Hunter Hernandez and Olivia Williams, alongside Sydney Burns of UC Davis, Kayanna Spriggs of CSUN, and Hennie van Schaik of CSU Bakersfield.

On The Big West All-Defensive Team with Utti and UCI’s Kayla Williams are UC San Diego sophomore Aishah Brown, Cal State Fullerton graduate student Carolyn Gill, and UC Davis redshirt senior Sage Stobbart.

Utti is also The Big West Best Defensive Player, and Gill the Best Hustle Player. Vanessa Austin of CSU Bakersfield is the Best Sixth Player. Utti, 2020 Mountain West Player of the Year at Fresno State leads the Big West and is sixth in the NCAA in steals per game this season at 3.16. Her 294 career steals rates ninth in Division I. Coming off the bench for the Roadrunners in 17 of 23 games played this season, Austin is in the top 10 in the league in rebounding (5.70 per game) and field goal percentage (.554). Gill tallies an averages of 7.2 points on 42 percent shooting, 5.85 rebounds and 0.62 blocks per game for Cal State Fullerton.