The Oregon State women’s basketball team will attempt to improve upon two of its worst efforts of the season this week when it travels to the Bay Area to play Pacific-10 Conference games with California and Stanford.

The Cardinal whipped OSU by 20 points (80-60) in Gill Coliseum on Jan. 5. The Golden Bears topped that with a 21-point victory (71-50) two days later.

The Beavers (9-9, 3-7) play Cal (14-7, 6-5) at Haas Pavilion at 7 o’clock tonight. They tangle with the 15th-ranked Cardinal at 2 p.m. Saturday at Maples Pavilion.

OSU hopes to bounce back from a 54-45 loss at Oregon this past Saturday where the Beavers shot 28 percent. The Beavers beat the Ducks 63-61 four days earlier on Mandy Close’s last-second three-point play.

“I thought it was intensely emotional,” first-year OSU coach LaVonda Wagner said of the quick turnaround, the shortest interval between Civil Wars in history. “From a scouting standpoint you didn’t have to do a lot of preparing because you’d already prepared for them once.

“I thought it was interesting. Obviously putting a little time between the first game and the second game is always good, but it’s the situation I inherited and you do what you have to do.”

The Beavers have already surpassed last year’s win total (9-7) and tripled last season’s Pac-10 win total (3-1) with nine regular-season and at least one Pac-10 tournament game remaining. So they can make real progress with a strong stretch drive.

“We’re always looking to make inroads, no matter what it is because the only way we can go here is up,” she said.

California used a 21-4 run midway through the first half to defeat OSU in their previous meeting. Cal’s four starting freshmen all scored in double figures and Ashley Walker had 14 points and 15 rebounds. The Beavers were outrebounded 40-24 and were 0-for-10 on 3-point shots.

Cal assistant coach Dean Mendes said that even though that win came fairly easily, there’s absolutely no chance the Bears will be overlooking OSU in anticipation of Saturday’s return engagement with Oregon, which hammered them 70-41 last month.

“We would like to be able to take both but we’re just focusing on Oregon State right now, to get that part of it taken care of first,” Mendes said Tuesday. “It is a very critical (series) for us.

“We look at every weekend as critical. We want to take one game at a time, but we still want to finish off a weekend. I don’t think there are surprise factors; people watch film and do scouting reports, coaches do their homework, and they don’t want to be surprised.

“Everybody takes everybody pretty seriously, from top to bottom.”

Stanford jumped to a big lead early and outrebounded the Beavers 21-2 in the first 14 minutes. The Cardinal led by as many as 39 points and played substitutes for much of the second half. Lake Oswego’s Jillian Harmon, a Cardinal freshman, had 22 points in her breakout game.

The Beavers are winless in 20 previous games in Maples Pavilion. Their chances of ending that streak are even more remote now that 6-foot-5 Cardinal junior center Kristen Newlin has returned from a stress fracture that idled her for eight games in January. She didn’t play in Corvallis.

“She’s another big body, and that’s what I’m excited about,” Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said.

Newlin is averaging 9.7 points and 7.4 rebounds

More bad news for the Beavers is VanDerveer’s feeling that the Cardinal are “finding their groove” heading into the final month of the regular season.

“We’ve improved tremendously since up in Oregon,” she said. “(Rosalyn Gold-Onwude) is playing well, Jillian Harmon is playing great, we’ve got Newlin back, and Candace Wiggins has gone off for 30 points three or four times since then.

“People have a better understanding of what they’re doing.”

Stanford had a seven-game winning streak snapped at UCLA on Jan. 27 but it recovered on Jan. 29 with a come-from-behind victory at USC. The Cardinal trailed by as many as nine points in the second half before rallying for a 78-69 victory.

“Our team had an up-and-down weekend and finished on an up,” she said. “We’re playing hungry, which is a very good thing for us. Our team learned a lot about itself. It learned they’ve got to be gritty, dig in get loose balls, make stops.”

You’d better come ready to play in this league; don’t show up with just your jersey on. We’re definitely still a work in progress.”