HONOLULU — Patience has paid off for Braelyn Akana.
A years-long conversion from middle to hitter has begun to bear fruit at the right-side pin, where Hawaii harvested one of the best games of Akana’s career to sweep rival Long Beach State, 26-24, 25-18, 25-18 at SimpliFi Arena on Friday night.
The fourth-year junior from Hauula led the Rainbow Wahine with a 4-for-4 effort in the key first set, hung tough after a couple of rejections and buried the match-winner as UH (15-6, 12-1 Big West) maintained its one-game lead on UC Santa Barbara (11-2) with seven to play.
Akana’s eight kills on 13 swings and .385 hitting was an instrumental component on a night where UH middles Amber Igiede and Tiffany Westerberg were held below their usual production and fellow attackers Riley Wagoner and Caylen Alexander didn't turn it on until late. It snapped a nine-game winning streak for the Beach (15-7, 10-4) that followed UH's four-set win at the Pyramid on Oct. 1.
The 6-foot Akana, a standout state champion middle at Kamehameha, was recruited by coach Robyn Ah Mow to be an eventual outside hitter, but roster needs necessitated that she be a middle in Manoa her true freshman year.
Then came the lost COVID season of 2020. Only in 2021 did she start to regularly play on the outside, but it was still slow going, even as younger sister Keonilei emerged as a key defensive specialist for a national runner-up team at Nebraska.
“I knew in the back of my head that I was going to be a pin hitter,” Akana told Spectrum News after Friday’s match. “I think that took a lot of time and a lot of patience, and Coach Rob was really helpful with me, Coach Nick (Castello), Coach Ang (former staff member Ljungqvist), Coach Kaleo (Baxter), they all really helped me stay patient with all of that. So, it’s been a really long experience, but I’m grateful for it right now. It’s worth it.”
When she missed the UC Irvine match on Oct. 7 with an illness, she watched it on TV and felt alone as her good friends performed without her. Akana felt a need to turn things up a notch in practices upon her return. It got Ah Mow and her staff thinking about ways to incorporate her more.
“We’ve been talking as coaches that we have to get some kind of production out of the right side,” Ah Mow said after Friday’s match. “I thought Brae was doing a great job within the last couple weeks, coming (strong) at practice. We need that right side.
“If the middles are taking the blockers and leaving our right side 1-on-1, that’s good for us,” she added. “And if we start building that right side like we did today continuously, then the team’s going to have to release, and pick and choose whether they want to stay with our middles, who (are) within the season playing very well, or go to our outsides. So, I thought (Akana) did a great job today.”
It’s been the most productive three-game stretch of her career as she’s averaged nine kills starting with last week’s road trip to UC Riverside and UC Davis.
Akana put down two more in Friday’s second set, got blocked once but put one down to end the frame.
“I feel like every practice I’ve gone in with the intention of being a stronger right-side hitter, so I feel like tonight that really showed some of the progress,” Akana said. “I’m not done at all, but that was really good. There were a lot of out-of-system balls that I got set that I thought I capitalized on, which was nice because we’ve been working on that all week.”
As the daughter of the Rainbow Wahine great Joselyn Robins, and part of an extremely athletic family in general – father Brandyn was a standout basketball player at BYU-Hawaii and was an assistant coach at UH, and uncle Jarinn is an ex-Rainbow Warrior and a notable NBA agent – patience might’ve been a hard thing to come by.
But one of the biggest moderating voices came from her mother, Akana said.
“It’s actually really funny because a lot of people ask me, ‘is your mom super hard on you?’” she said. “But she’s my mom, she knows how I like to be talked to and stuff like that. She’s just always been super positive about it and encouraging about everything. She was also really good with the patience thing. ‘Be patient, keep working hard and it will all pay off.’ I think she’s been such a good example and resource for me on and off the court.”
While Akana still had some family in the stands for her breakout game among the 5,203 in house, her immediate family was in the Lone Star State to see Keonilei, now a libero at Texas, and brother Tausili, a linebacker at Skyridge High (Utah) who is taking his official visit to Texas A&M.
The nuances of the right side – reading the tempo, putting the correct angles on shots and getting positive touches as a blocker – were Akana’s biggest areas of focus this season, which she opened with a 10-kill, six-error outing at A&M in August. She’ll have one more year to keep working at it, as she is set to get her undergraduate degree in psychology in December, but plans to stick around for her senior year as a graduate student.
The Beach started reading her in the third, blocking her two times until, on a rare set from Westerberg, not Kate Lang, Akana elevated and put it down along the sideline to cap a 7-1 Wahine run to end the match and claim the 11th straight UH win in the series.
It was a special ending to a surreal night for a player whose expression said it all.
“It’s literally a dream. I’ve dreamed of this forever,” she said. “It’s nice that the work has kind of talked for itself.”
UH hosts Cal State Fullerton (12-9, 6-7) at 7 p.m. Saturday.
Brian McInnis covers the state’s sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii.