University of Hawaii basketball coaches Eran Ganot and Laura Beeman reacted with moderate enthusiasm to format changes to the men’s and women’s conference tournaments announced by the Big West on Friday.

Starting in the upcoming 2023-24 season, the BWC will run identical four-day, eight-team tournaments on the men’s and women’s side with a staggered bracket format in which the top two seeds get double byes into the semifinals, and the Nos. 3 and 4 seeds get a single bye past the first round.

It is new on the men’s side of Big West hoops, while the BWC women used that format up until 2019, at which point the conference expanded from nine to 11 teams and both sides began inviting all eligible teams to the tournament.

“My take on it is, I think the new format rewards the higher seeds, which I think is a good thing,” Ganot told Spectrum News. “I have some experience with that with the (West Coast Conference) doing something similar, at least when I was at Saint Mary’s. I know a lot of formats have changed for a lot of tournaments here and there.”

Beeman told Spectrum News she considered it from the standpoint of getting the league to multiple-bid status to the NCAA Tournament. In that, she said it was a step in the right direction because it helps protect the league’s best regular-season teams, increasing the chances of a quality team making a run in the NCAAs and earning respect for the BWC for future years.

“I think that’s probably the correct direction to go, to try to get to that end result,” said Beeman, who coached the Rainbow Wahine to the last two Big West tournament titles as the Nos. 1 and 3 seeds, in a phone interview from Hawaii Island.

The changes have the potential of adding more drama to the lengthy 20-game conference regular season. From late December to early March, teams will battle to place themselves in the best possible tier come tournament time. One marked change is that the bottom three teams (two in the coming season as UC San Diego is not eligible for the postseason as a transitional Division I team) will not make it to the Dollar Loan Center in Henderson, Nev., at all.

Beeman said there was likely no realistic way to invite all 22 men’s and women’s teams to one venue over four days and still give every team its due with coverage in every round, especially on the women’s side.

“You want everyone to experience it, but if you want to try to advance this conference (nationally), you have to make a sacrifice,” Beeman said.

The Big West stuck with the 20-game regular-season format with league play starting Dec. 28 in 2023-24 but said conference games will be strictly on Thursdays and Saturdays, with two bye dates for each team. The league experimented with occasional Monday games in 2022-23, resulting in some teams playing four times in eight days. Several coaches voiced concerns about the wear and tear and imbalance in the schedule.

For UH, schedule quirks are nothing new in the California-centric conference. For example, an opponent in a single-game week occasionally makes its road trip to Honolulu in a week in which the Rainbow Warriors or Wahine have to play two opponents, Thursday and Saturday.

Ganot alluded to that Friday but stopped short of criticism.

“There’s been challenges with competitive equity putting these schedules together and I think moving toward (the new) postseason format should put more onus on the conference to make sure there’s competitive equity in the regular season, because the seeding is so important,” Ganot said.

In the 2023 BWC tournament, the UH men were the No. 5 seed and needed to win three times in three days to reach the NCAAs. They lost in the quarterfinals to No. 4 seed Cal State Fullerton. Were UH the 5 seed next year, it would have to win four times in four days.

That task is certainly more difficult, but not impossible: In 2018, the Cal State Northridge women did something close to it, winning four times in five days against better-rested opponents to punch their NCAA ticket as the No. 5 seed.

Another change by the BWC Board of Directors announced Friday was a clarification to the conference’s force majeure policy across all the BWC’s sports in an apparent response to strategic pullouts of games by BWC schools in men’s and women’s basketball in the 2022-23 season.

Going forward, games will be declared a “no contest” only in situations in which an entire team is unavailable to compete, the league said. “Any game not played for any reason other than a force majeure situation will result in a forfeit for the team that cancels,” the BWC wrote.

Last year, BWC men’s and women’s basketball teams were permitted to take no-contests for games in which a handful of key players were unavailable for reasons that included injury. The tactic came into prominence in the wake of widespread cancelations of contests due to COVID-19 health and safety protocols in the 2020-21 season.

In the final stretch of the 2022-23 season, the Cal State Fullerton men saw two opponents, UC Davis and Cal Poly, pull out of games, impacting seeding scenarios that came down to winning percentage. On the women's side, UC Irvine pulled out of two games and went on to win the regular season by virtue of winning percentage.

“Last year … even a game or two (missed) impacted the seedings,” Ganot said. “I think it could’ve impacted who could win the conference. It’s hard because I know there’s situations that demand that a team cannot play. But ultimately you hope we can get back to normal.”

Also Friday, the previously announced BWC baseball tournament set to debut in 2025 took on new detail with the disclosure that it will be a five-team event.

UH coach Rich Hill, who has said he is in favor of a conference tournament, did not respond to a request for comment Friday. UH would’ve qualified among the top five in both of Hill’s first two seasons in Manoa; the Rainbow Warriors finished third and tied for fifth in the regular season in 2022 and 2023.

Other aspects of the tournament format and site have yet to be announced.

The Big West will add men’s and women’s swimming and diving as a sanctioned sport starting in 2024-25.

UH currently competes in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation for swimming and diving for men and women.

Brian McInnis covers the state's sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii. He can be reached at brian.mcinnis@charter.com.