IRVINE, Calif. – In 1992, the NCAA’s most geographically diverse conference was born of a collaboration of vagabond schools, inaugurating an intercollegiate athletics league that has undergone 30 years of change to become what it is today.
 
The Pacific West Conference was formed by a merger between the Great Northwest Conference and the Continental Divide Conference. The schools came together from across the western states to form a new and geographically diverse NCAA Division II conference, a league that would have many different faces over the next few decades.
 
During the 1980s and 90s, NCAA Division II was more and more becoming a conference led division, which meant for member institutions that being part of a multi-sport conference was increasingly important. Conference membership benefitted schools with increased access to postseason opportunities through automatic bids as well as grant money from the NCAA.
 
That is what led to the Great Northwest Conference (GNC) for men’s basketball and the Continental Divide Conference (CDC) for women’s sports to combine to form the Pacific West Conference with eight charter members: Alaska Anchorage, Alaska Fairbanks, Chaminade, Eastern Montana (now MSU Billings), Grand Canyon, Portland State and Seattle Pacific.
 
This group of schools scattered throughout the western half of the United States was united by a common need to find games to fill their schedules. That is what initially led to the unlikely alliance of a geographically diverse group of schools to join together to form two conferences in the early 1980s.
 
The GNC, not to be confused with the Great Northwest Athletic Conference of today, began in 1981 as a men’s basketball conference with six charter members: Alaska Anchorage, Alaska Fairbanks, Eastern Montana, Eastern Washington, Puget Sound and Seattle Pacific. The following year, the CDC was formed for women’s volleyball and basketball with Air Force, Colorado College, Denver and Northern Colorado as its charter members. In 1984, the GNC members from Alaska and Montana joined the CDC for their women’s sports, marking the first time that the two conferences had members that overlapped.
 
Elwood “Woody” Hahn, who was a Pioneer League pitcher for the Billings Mustangs in the early 1960s, was the baseball coach at Eastern Montana and before becoming the Athletic Director. In 1988, he retired from being an Athletic Director to become the Commissioner of both the GNC and CDC, bringing the two conferences even closer together. He replaced Chris Dittman, who served in the role of commissioner of the CDC, while also being the Athletic Director of Regis.
 
Between 1989 and 1990, the two conferences lost five members from Colorado who broke off to join the Colorado Athletic Conference, leaving the CDC with only four members and the GNC with five following the addition of Grand Canyon to both leagues. In the summer of 1991, both leagues added one member with Portland State joining the CDC, while Chaminade joined the GNC.
 
Chaminade’s men’s basketball team had risen to national prominence as a result of its famous 1982 defeat of top-ranked Virginia. That led to the creation of the Maui Classic, which would be an annual event featuring some of the top NCAA Division I men’s basketball programs hosted by Chaminade. In order for the Silverswords to host an NCAA sanctioned event, they had to be NCAA members, so Chaminade began the transition in 1990 to NCAA membership and joined the GNC.
 
During the 1991-92 season, the GNC had six members, but the CDC only had five members, which was one shy of the sport sponsorship minimum. The lone school with women’s sports that was in the GNC, but not the CDC was Seattle Pacific, which still competed in the NAIA at the time. Eventually Seattle Pacific decided to have all of their sports competing in the same division, bringing the women’s sports into the NCAA.
 
With the same schools, schedules and commissioner as before, one of the few matters that needed to be settled was the selection of a name and logo for the new conference. The conference’s sports information directors came up with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion make the name “Great Western Hemisphere Conference” in reference to the incredible geographic diversity of the new conference.
 
Eventually the name Pacific West Conference was approved, and Commissioner Hahn turned to Portland State sports information director Mike Lund to create a logo. Lund asked a mutual friend with experience in graphic design to come up with a logo that represented all of the conference’s geographic regions, and that logo was eventually approved by Commissioner Hahn.
 
The logo was a semicircle in the shape of a setting sun with waves on the left side, a snow-capped mountain in the middle and a cactus on the right side to represent the primary geographies represented by the PacWest. Beneath the scenery, the logo said “PACIFIC WEST CONFERENCE” with a small “NCAADII” in the bottom right. That simple logo was the basis for the conference logo until 2011.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE HISTORY OF THE PACWEST LOGO
 
On June 3, 1992, the Seattle Times reported on the creation of the new conference.
 
“Seattle Pacific joined six other NCAA Division II schools in announcing formation of the Pacific West Conference. The new league merges the men's Great Northwest Conference and the women's Continental Divide Conference. It will have women's basketball and volleyball and men's basketball competition starting in the 1992-93 seasons.

“Other member schools are Alaska Anchorage, Alaska Fairbanks, Chaminade of Honolulu, Eastern Montana, Grand Canyon of Phoenix and Portland State. The Alaska schools, Eastern Montana, Grand Canyon and SPU held dual membership in the Great Northwest and Continental Divide conferences in 1991-92. Chaminade of Honolulu, which joined the Great Northwest Conference last year, will take part only in men's basketball. Portland State, which joined the Continental Divide in 1991, will participate only in women's basketball.
 
“Woody Hahn was named league commissioner. Keith Baker, Grand Canyon associate athletic director, will be conference president. Frank MacDonald, SPU sports information director, was appointed media relations director.”

The eight schools spanned across four time zones and six states with Portland State and Seattle Pacific being the only pair of schools that were within reasonable driving distance of each other. Despite being sprawled out across the country, the schools represented cities with major airports such as Honolulu, Seattle, Phoenix, Portland and Anchorage. Even Billings, Fairbanks and Hilo, which were harder to reach, had direct flights from cities represented by other PacWest schools. That created natural travel partners in the conference, which still required creative scheduling.
 
In some ways, the PacWest was a new name more than a new conference. In a men’s basketball release after the first season of the PacWest, Tim Haag, who was the conference SID for men’s basketball said “Mayhue and Briscoe become the 7th and 8th players in the 11 year history of the conference to earn back-to-back first team honors.” The merge of the two conferences into a multi-sport conference was a natural one that immediately benefitted its members with a more prominent standing in the NCAA.
 
 

The PacWest experienced only a few membership changes in the early years. Hawai`i Hilo became interested in competing in NCAA Division II due to the increased costs that came with postseason success in the NAIA, which is a common theme for schools that have followed the Vulcans in joining the PacWest from the NAIA. The Vulcans began to compete in the PacWest in 1993-94 though they were not full members of NCAA Division II yet. Despite taking fourth place in the men’s basketball standings, Hawai`i Hilo went on to compete in the NAIA District tournament, while Grand Canyon earned the No. 4 seed in the second ever PacWest Tournament, which the ‘Lopes went on to win. The following season, Hawai`i Hilo became a full member of the NCAA and PacWest.
 
Of the eight schools in the PacWest, Grand Canyon was arguably the most geographically isolated. At the same time, the PacWest was teetering on the edge of sports sponsorship minimums, which made Western New Mexico in Silver City an attractive addition to the conference despite being 4.5-hour drive from Phoenix.
 
The pending addition of Western New Mexico was set to make it mandatory for all PacWest schools that sponsored volleyball to schedule with the conference. Up to that point, Hawai`i Hilo and Chaminade as well as Portland State had abstained from PacWest volleyball, competing instead in the Hawai`i Intercollegiate Athletic Conference with BYU-Hawaii and Hawai`i Pacific, which were both NAIA institutions.
 
The potential change caused concern particularly for Chaminade, whose president Kent Keith wrote a letter to Commissioner Hahn that was hand-delivered by Athletic Director Don Doucette. In it he said, “This causes a serious problem for Chaminade University’s athletic program. The volleyball program has been budgeted only $5,000 for travel for this year and next year. Complying with the new PacWest requirement to schedule volleyball would add more than $30,000 per year in travel costs.” He asked for a one-year grace period, and his request was discussed at the January meetings in the 1994 NCAA Convention.
 
At the same time Western New Mexico was looking to join, there were changes happening outside the PacWest that threw a wrench into the expansion plan. The California Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA) had been the dominant conference in the West Region for decades, and some of their member schools had become too big for NCAA Division II. Cal State Northridge was the first in a series of schools to make the move to Division I, causing the remaining schools to seek new members in order to keep the number of conference members high.
 
The CCAA began to recruit Grand Canyon, which would be the only private institution and the only school from Arizona to be in the CCAA. Grand Canyon’s baseball coach and Athletic Director Dr. Gil Stafford decided to accept the CCAA’s invitation, making the 1993-94 season Grand Canyon’s last year in the PacWest for the time being. Keith Baker was the president of the PacWest and announced to the members that Grand Canyon was going to leave the conference right before Western New Mexico was set to join.
 
The news of Grand Canyon’s departure left the PacWest’s newest member without a natural travel partner. That forced Western New Mexico to pair up with Montana State Billings, producing an odd couple for PacWest travel plans. However, the two schools remained connected at the hip throughout their membership in the PacWest until 2005 when they both joined the Heartland Conference together.
 
Chaminade and Hawai`i Hilo proved their commitment to the PacWest as its newest members by eventually agreeing to play the full conference schedule in 1994. That year, Hawai`i Hilo won a share of the conference title with Portland State, and Chaminade won the title outright in 1996. The two programs had something like dual citizenship during 1994-97, continuing to compete in the HIAC until BYU-Hawaii and Hawai`i Pacific both became members of the PacWest the following year.
 
Commissioner Hahn sought to increase the visibility of the PacWest by aggressively pursuing hosting bids for regional and national tournaments. Cal State Bakersfield often outbid PacWest schools for the right to host tournaments, so Commissioner Hahn started setting aside conference dollars to increase the chances of PacWest schools to win bids. While it remained rare for PacWest schools to win bids, the conference improved its performance at the regional stage over the years.
 
From 1992 to 1998, a PacWest team reached the West Regional final in men’s basketball five times, and a PacWest-best three teams qualified in 1996. In women’s basketball, Portland State won the West Region in 1995 and 1996, reaching the national championship game in 1995. Then Seattle Pacific won the West Region, beating UC Davis in overtime in the championship game in 1998. In 1994, Portland State won the NCAA West Region title in volleyball.
 
Commissioner Hahn also added men’s and women’s cross country as PacWest sports, but the spring sports didn’t become part of the PacWest identity until the formation of the megaconference in the summer of 1998. Today, over half of the sports sponsored by the PacWest are played during the spring season.
 
Despite being a rag-tag group of schools that didn’t fit neatly with the geography of any of the existing conferences, the eight charter schools banded together to form the PacWest, which is still going strong 30 years later. Through the peaks and valleys and constantly-changing membership, what was started in 1992 through the merger of the GNC and CDC resulted in a strong NCAA Division II conference that has served tens of thousands of student-athletes in its storied history.
 
Part 2 of the PacWest history will come out on July 28, looking at the period of time when the PacWest ballooned into a 16-member conference before eventually splitting into two conferences.
 
Acknowledgements: A number of people were helpful in compiling the information for this history. Thank you to the following people for taking the time to talk over the phone and share stories of their memories from the last 30 years of the PacWest history: Keith Baker (Grand Canyon), Jon Carey (Western Oregon), Josh Doody (Notre Dame de Namur), Joey Estrella (Hawai`i Hilo), Gary Gray (Montana State Billings), Bob Guptil (PacWest), Woody Hahn (PacWest), Richard Hannan (GNAC), Ethan Hamilton (Point Loma), Bob Hogue (PacWest), Dexter Irvin (Dixie State & Hawai`i Hilo), Mike Lund (Portland State), Frank MacDonald (Seattle Pacific), Keith Phillips (Seattle Pacific), Gary Pine (Azusa Pacific), Dave Porter (BYU-Hawaii), Ken Wagner (BYU-Hawaii)