Mano Antiga, a freshman from Lublin, Poland, had never heard of Las Vegas until recently.

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Mano Antiga, a freshman from Lublin, Poland, had never heard of Las Vegas until recently.

“I just know about the casinos,” she said.

Jaci Miyasaki, a sophomore libero who graduated from Kalani High School, has only recently started to visit Las Vegas to see family and friends.

“Well, every time I go up there, I only stay at the Cal or Main Street so (my favorite) is the oxtail soup,” she said. “There’s a lot of pieces of oxtail they put in and it’s a pretty good price so I’ll go with that.”

Known among other things as the entertainment capital of the world, Las Vegas has something for everyone, including volleyball.

The Rainbow Wahine volleyball team is taking a business trip to the Orleans Hotel, where it will play in the Lucky Aces Women’s Volleyball Invitational starting this afternoon against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi (2-5).

The competition rises continuously over the weekend as UH will also play Iowa State (5-3) out of the Big 12 and UCLA, which is just outside of the AVCA top 25 rankings this week as the second team out.

It’s the first road trip for the team, and for head coach Joshua Walker in his new position. The team had scheduled an exhibition at Hawaii Hilo last month that got canceled because of Hurricane Lala.

“We obviously wish we could have made the Hilo trip to kind of practice for a road trip, but this being our first opportunity, everybody is pretty excited to see if we can continue to do on the road what we’ve been doing at home,” Walker said.

Hawaii is 6-2 after its opening eight-match homestand. The two losses were against No. 18 Baylor (6-2) and San Diego (3-5), which have only lost to teams now ranked in the Top 25.

The Rainbow Wahine have won five in a row and are led by outside hitter Panna Ratkai, who ranks fifth in the Mountain West averaging 3.23 kills per set.

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Junior middle Miliana Sylvester is second in the conference with 35 total blocks, averaging 1.13 per set.

“It’s going to be difficult because all of these teams are talented,” Walker said of the tournament. “Corpus Christi, for example, they have some really high-level receivers and some good experience. So for us, we’ve been able to get teams out of system with our service and we’re going to have to continue to do that to help us win.”

Sophomore outside hitter Cha’lei Reid remains day-to-day with a shoulder injury, but was part of the traveling party that left early Wednesday morning.

The team was due to arrive in Las Vegas in the afternoon and get in a practice before again practicing in the Orleans Arena today.

Hawaii has never played the Islanders before and its only match against the Cyclones came in the 2023 NCAA Tournament, when UH won in four sets in the first round in Eugene, Ore.

Sunday’s finale will be the 80th all-time meeting between the Rainbow Wahine and the Bruins.

UCLA leads the overall series 41-38 due to winning the last three matches between the schools.

After a blitz of matches to open the season, Hawaii hasn’t played since Friday, which has allowed Walker to enjoy a couple of extra practices.

“We’ve had some extra practices and for us to be able to maximize getting more touches without having to spend a super long time to do it because we’ve had more days to get ready; we’ve wanted to sure up the quality of things we’re doing kind of like we did when we were having camp,” Walker said. “A lot of serve and pass. We know that has to be important and doing that in different environments is really important.”

UH has allowed its opponents to hit just .151 this season, which is tops in the Mountain West Conference and 22nd nationally.

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