With much of the Pac-12 moving elsewhere, Washington State and Oregon State have found a different home for most of their sports. The schools will join the West Coast Conference (WCC) for the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 seasons as affiliate members in all sports except football and baseball.
The schools have already agreed to join the Mountain West Conference in football. Notably, the WCC does not sponsor football.
The two schools were the only schools to not depart the Pac-12 for the Big 12, Big Ten, or ACC. They are now in a legal battle over how the payout from the Pac-12 TV deal will be divided as that deal is set to expire on July 1, 2024.
USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington are headed to the Big Ten. Cal and Stanford are headed to the ACC, while Colorado, Arizona, Arizona St, and Utah are joining the Big 12.
The West Coast Conference sponsors a total of 16 sports, seven on the men’s side and nine on the women’s side. The conference does not sponsor swimming and diving for either gender.
Only Washington State is home to a women’s swimming and diving program as Oregon State cut its women’s program back in 2019. Oregon State did not have a men’s program at the time and Washington State does not have a men’s program.
This past season, the Washington State women finished 8th out of 8 teams at the Pac-12 Championships. The team sent two individuals to NCAAs in Knoxville as Dori Hathazi swam in prelims of the 200 butterfly and Emily Lundgren swam in prelims of the 100 and 200 breaststrokes. Both were freshman at the time and are now in their sophomore seasons. WSU head coach Matt Leach is currently in his sixth season leading the Cougar women.
Feel for the women’s swim team. Attended a meet there on October 2022 and it was a great supportive crowd with decent facilities and a Incredibly fun small town atmosphere.
so who’s in pac-12 now? ucla cal wsu leaving…
My dude there is no pac-12 left the house is empty
It’s the PAC2.
looks like they will split $500miliion between just the two. Win for them
I suspect that some settlement will be reached that sees WSU and OSU getting the lion’s share of that $500 million, but not the entirety of it.
With 4 WCC schools already having women’s S&D, will the addition of wazzu push them to add at least a women’s championship and leave the men with mpsf?
America East cut their men’s championship meet sometime in like ’14, and they added it back in ’21/’22 I think. Mostly because NJIT agreed to join the conference, so they had NJIT, Binghamton, UMBC, and Maine. It was my understanding it was a seamless transition because the conference was already hosting a women’s championship.
Each school in the WCC will have to really push their conference to add this because it’ll be going from 0% to 100% – unlike the Men’s America East where it had maybe 75% of the infrastructure in place. It’ll probably require new hires to organize it, cover the teams on social media, etc… It’s not as simple as finding pool space and selecting a date.
mountain west or mpsf is where they should go
wow