In the years after the NCAA took control of women’s championships away from the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), it pushed for another landscape-altering change. The NCAA wanted to align women’s programs with their respective men’s programs in the same conferences.
Much like the great realignment of 2023, it sent shock waves through the sport’s West Coast teams. The Northern Pacific Athletic Conference (NorPac) disbanded on June 30, 1986, allowing Oregon, Oregon State, California, Washington and Washington State to join a newly forming Pac-10 conference. The women’s-only Western Collegiate Athletic Association (WCAA) did the same with Arizona, Arizona State, Stanford, UCLA and Southern California.
It was the beginning of a 38-year stretch of success for women in the “Conference of Champions” that will come to an end this summer. The conference will essentially disband on July 1 after school commissioners gutted the Pac-12, which welcomed Colorado and Utah in 2011, after 108 years of existence.
UCLA and USC had already announced in 2022 entry to the Big Ten, and will now be joined by Washington and Oregon. Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado will join the Big 12. And Stanford and Cal will join the ACC. Washington State and Oregon State were left behind.
In the months before the Pac-12 becomes another ghost of conferences past, its women’s basketball programs are poised to show why most were excited for the formation in the first place.
The Pac-12 is set to be one of the most hotly contested conferences in the nation with a handful of schools that could make a late go of it in the 2024 NCAA tournament. Five teams are ranked in the Associated Press Top 25 poll, one fewer than the ACC. But all five of those are ranked in the top 15, higher than all but two of the ACC’s programs.
No. 2 UCLA (12-0) has the résumé to be the top team in the country, stymied only by No. 1 South Carolina. No. 5 Colorado (11-1) opened the 2023-24 NCAA season by upsetting the reigning champion LSU Tigers. No. 8 Stanford (12-1) returns shot-blocking extraordinaire and projected WNBA lottery pick Cameron Brink to lead a vaunted frontcourt. No. 9 USC (10-1) has only lost to UCLA in a sold-out Pac-12 opener last weekend with freshman sensation JuJu Watkins, a local star, leading the way. No. 15 Utah (10-3) nearly took down top-seeded South Carolina behind post Alissa Pili’s prolific scoring.
“Prestige,” the word of choice in the conference’s premiere season, fits well again in the finale. When the Statesman (Oregon) Journal wrote in 1986 about the Ducks and Beavers joining a conference featuring USC, already a two-time NCAA champion with a three-time Naismith winner in Cheryl Miller, it led with a question.
“What does a Northwest women’s basketball team have to do to get some respect?” Marc Faulconer wrote. “Answer: Join a major conference.”
Catherine Green, the associate director of athletics at the University of Washington in 1986, described the same “added prestige” in a story for the Tacoma News Tribune. The Huskies won the NorPac conference each of the previous two seasons.
“Overall, we’ll have the strongest conference in the country for women,” Green told the News Tribune, citing the 17 team and 68 individual titles won by Pac-10 teams since the NCAA took over women’s competitions in 1982. Southwest placed second with seven team titles.
In the inaugural season, the Pac-10 finished sixth of 31 conferences with a collective .585 winning percentage, according to Sports Reference data. Three teams appeared in the NCAA tournament: USC (15-3, regular-season Pac-10 champion), Washington (14-4) and Oregon (14-4). UCLA was fourth (11-7) in the conference and Cal finished fifth (10-8), but held the claim of defeating the conference’s three best teams at least once.
Stanford set the standard for excellence over the coming decades with 26 regular-season conference crowns. The Cardinal won 15 of the 22 conference tournaments when they began in 2001-02, more than a decade after the men introduced theirs in 1986-87. Head coach Tara VanDerveer took them to every NCAA tournament since missing their first in 1987 and won three titles in 1990, 1992 and 2021.
Yet, the Cardinal were merely the prestigious leaders in USC’s footsteps.
By the 1991-92 season, the Pac-10 led all conferences with a national-best five teams in the NCAA tournament, which was a 32-team field until 1994. That ’94 season, the Pac-10 led all conferences in winning percentage (.622), one of only two times the conference has done it. They produced three Naismith winners in the ’90s: Stanford’s Jennifer Azzi (1990) and Kate Starbird (1997), and USC’s Lisa Leslie (1994).
The conference’s greatest success has arguably come over the past decade, culminating to its untimely end. In 2016, two teams reached the Final Four for the first time in conference history. Oregon State, a No. 2 seed in the field, and No. 7 seed Washington each lost in the semifinals. The following year, the Pac-12 put a conference-best seven teams in and in 2019-20, the season the NCAA tournament was canceled, the Pac-12 led in winning percentage a second time (.624).
Two of the last seven Naismith Player of the Year winners are from the Pac-12: Oregon’s Sabrina Ionescu (2020) and Washington’s Kelsey Plum (2017). Both were No. 1 overall picks in the WNBA Draft, joining in the conference likes of Chiney Ogwumike and Nneka Ogwumike of Stanford and Tina Thompson of USC.
The peak of Pac-12 women’s basketball history came in 2021 when Arizona and Stanford played each other for the national championship. It was the first time in women’s or men’s NCAA basketball tournament history that two Pac-12 teams met in the final.
“This is honestly a dream come true for us in the Pac-12 because for so long, the conference has not gotten the respect that I feel it deserves,” VanDerveer said ahead of the title game.
“I think you need to respect the Pac-12 a lot more,” Arizona head coach Adia Barnes, an All-American and Pac-10 Player of the Year in 1997-98, said.
It could be a false summit. The conference combined to go 117-20 in the nonconference schedule this season, a stat that includes signature wins against some of the game’s best. It leads all conferences through Jan. 3 with a .822 winning percentage, besting the SEC (.798) with a far stronger strength of schedule.
The battle at the top for the regular-season crown is set to be as fierce as last season when four wins separated Utah (15-3) and Stanford (15-3) from the three teams in fourth at 11-7. It was the fewest wins between the first team in the standings and the sixth in at least a decade.
None of those six teams even won the tournament championship. That was No. 7-seeded Washington State (9-9), which made its first appearance in the title game and broke an 82-year drought of basketball titles at the school.
It’s early, but more teams this season appear ready to make deeper runs in the NCAA tournament than 2023, when no one from the Pac-12’s seven selections represented farther than the Sweet 16.
UCLA could play in the season’s final game, a fitting cap to the conference’s illustrious moniker. Stanford, Colorado, even USC or Utah could do the same.
And there is likely to be one, if not more, Pac-12 players at the Naismith Award ceremony that week. Not to mention more hardware spread around. Only one player on the 2023 Naismith starting five is still in college, opening room for different players to take their spot. Brink and Pili are front-runners for NPOY. Watkins is a leading candidate for Freshman of the Year honors.
For a short while longer, the prestige is still the Pac-12’s to retain. It has the makings of the strongest women’s basketball season it has ever experienced. And, given its swan song, it’s receiving the respect to match.
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