HONOLULU — The Hawaii baseball team couldn’t capitalize on some late-innings opportunities and fell 5-2 to Rice in the opening game of a four-game set against the Rainbow Warriors’ old Western Athletic Conference foe at Les Murakami Stadium on Friday night.

UH (7-6) loaded the bases in both the eighth and ninth innings before falling for the third time in four Friday series-opening games this season. The ‘Bows were held to five hits and left 11 men stranded.

Stone Miyao drew a two-out, bases-loaded walk in the eighth to cut UH’s deficit to 4-2, but the inning ended a batter later on Kyson Donahue’s groundout.

UH loaded the bases with walks with one out in the ninth to bring up the winning run at the plate, but Ben Zeigler-Namoa hit into a 4-6-3 double play to end the game.

"I felt like this was probably our best team win so far this year," Rice coach Jose Cruz Jr. told Owls Athletics afterward. He said the hostile crowd at the Les "felt like it was 10,000 people here in the stadium today." (The official tickets issued count was 2,958.)

"The bullpen did a great job to hold them down," Cruz said. "They're a very formidable offensive unit, and they're really fast. We were able to capitalize on a couple of their mistakes and kept pushing."

Rice (5-8), the private Houston school now of the American Athletic Conference, got to starter Harrison Bodendorf (0-2) for two two runs in the second inning and the left-hander was chased after three-plus innings of work. Alex Giroux came on in relief and struck out six of the first seven batters he saw, but gave up two more runs in 3 2/3 innings.

The Owls added an insurance run in the top of the ninth inning when Kyte McDonald tripled to right off of Tai Atkins and Jack Riedel doubled him in off of the first pitch he saw. Zac Tenn worked around a walk to pick up the last three outs for UH.

Parker Smith (2-2) went five innings with three hits, four walks and one run allowed to pick up the win for Rice. Garrett Stratton came on for the last two outs and issued a walk to Matthew Miura before earning the save.

Randy Abshier is the likely UH starter for Game 2 of the series at 6:35 p.m. Saturday.

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