The West Coast Conference is a NCAAcollegiate athletics conference consisting of eight member schools in California, Oregon, and Washington. It was founded in 1952 as the California Basketball Association by a group of five schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, became the West Coast Athletic Conference in 1956, and adopted its current name in 1989.[1] All of the current members are private, religiously-affiliated institutions; four of the eight are Jesuit, and only Pepperdine is not Catholic. It is also a remarkably stable union in the constantly changing world of college athletics. The WCC has not had a school join or leave the conference for nearly 30 years (Gonzaga and Nevada traded conferences (Big Sky) in 1979). Only two conferences, the Ivy League and the Pac-10, have remained unchanged for a longer period of time. The league was chartered by five northern California institutions, four from the Bay Area (San Francisco, Saint Mary's, Santa Clara, San Jose State) and Pacific from Stockton. It began as the California Basketball Association, playing its first game on January 2, 1953. After two seasons under that name, the conference expanded to include Loyola Marymount and Pepperdine in 1955, and became the "West Coast Athletic Conference" in 1956. The name was shortened in 1989, dropping the the word "Athletic." [1] The WCC participates in NCAA Division I and is considered to be one of the better mid-major conferences in the country. The conference sponsors 13 sports but does not include football as one of them. In fact, San Diego is the only conference member that still plays football at any level; the rest have all dropped the sport, some as early as the 1940s, before the conference existed (Gonzaga and Portland), and one as late as 2003 (Saint Mary's). The WCC's strongest sports historically have been soccer (nine national champions, including back-to-back women's soccer titles in 2001 and 2002) and tennis (five individual champions and one team champion). The conference has also made its presence felt nationally in men's basketball, with San Francisco winning two consecutive national titles in the 1950s with all-time great Bill Russell, Loyola Marymount's inspired NCAA tournament run in 1990 following the tragic death of Hank Gathers during that season's WCC championship tournament, and most recently Gonzaga's rise to national prominence since 1999's Cinderella run to the Elite 8. Gonzaga has made it to the NCAA tournament each year since then.
Seattle University (1971-1980) eventually joined the NCAA Division II ranks but is conducting an athletics study to determine if moving back to Division I and re-joining the WCC would be possible.[2] Recently, the WCC decided not to expand conference membership now or in the foreseeable future.
