IRVINE, Calif. – The Pacific West Conference has had several iterations over its 30-year history, including a three-year period during the turn of the millennium when the conference contained 16 members across four time zones in eight states to be the largest geographical conference in all of the NCAA.
 
The size of the PacWest ballooned from seven members in 1998 to 16 the following year as the conference experimented with having schools spread across the country, including Alaska, New Mexico, Montana and Hawai`i. However, the experiment ultimately proved to be too challenging, leading to 10 schools splitting off after the 2000-01 season to form what is now the Great Northwest Athletic Conference.
 
The PacWest was originally formed in the summer of 1992 from the merger of the Great Northwest Conference and the Continental Divide Conference. The PacWest had eight member schools with seven teams in men’s basketball and six in women’s basketball.
 
Grand Canyon was one of the eight charter members of the PacWest, but notified the conference of its intention to join the California Collegiate Athletic Association at the conclusion of the 1993-94 season. The Antelopes’ departure would have caused the conference to drop below the minimum number of women’s basketball teams necessary for sport sponsorship, but Western New Mexico joined the conference the following season, keeping the conference above the minimum.
 
The potential of dropping below minimums in the future caused the conference to begin serious talks about expansion as early as the fall of 1993. Expansion was at the top of the agenda for the meeting of Athletic Directors on September 12, 1993 in the Red Lion Downtown in Portland, Oregon. The minutes from the meeting say “It was the feeling of the group that we move ahead and aggressively seek new members.”
 
Despite the discussion and forming of an expansion committee led by PacWest Commissioner Woody Hahn, no progress was made in expansion beyond officially accepting Western New Mexico in to the conference. However, expansion soon became an even more pressing issue when Portland State, which competed in the PacWest only in the women’s sports, announced its intention to depart the PacWest after the 1995-96 season. Their impending exit would cause the conference to lose women’s basketball as a sport.
 
On June 1, 1995, a “sample” for circulation among the conference members written on the conference header outlined what conference expansion could look like. The proposal included 14 teams that were divided into two divisions. The Pacific Division was made up of Chaminade, Hawai`i Pacific, Seattle Pacific, Western Washington, Saint Martin’s, Central Washington and Lewis-Clark State. The Mountain Division according to this proposal would include BYU-Hawaii, Hawai`i Hilo, Alaska Anchorage, Alaska Fairbanks, Montana State Billings, Western New Mexico and Seattle University. Someone also scribbled onto the document that this may happen in 1996 or 1997.
 
During the conference’s fall meetings on September 17, 1995, in the basement of the Naniloa Hotel on the big island in Hawai`i, expansion was once again the primary topic of discussion. Along with each of the PacWest’s member schools being represented, three guests joined the meeting. Gary Picone, from Lewis-Clark State, indicated that his school along with Western Washington, Central Washington and Saint Martin’s wanted to leave the Pacific Northwest Athletic Conference to join the PacWest as a group.
 
Also in attendance were Ken Wagner from BYU-Hawaii and Darrell Matsui from Hawai`i Pacific. Both schools recognized the need of the four Hawai`i schools to be united under one conference, so both athletic directors expressed strong interest in joining the PacWest.

Ken Wagner served as the athletic director for BYU-Hawaii for 15 of the years that the Seasiders were in the PacWest. Click here for a full list of the athletic directors in the PacWest's 30 years.
 
The following day was the members only meeting where Harry Larrabee from Alaska Anchorage presented a plan for expansion. The result of that discussion was to put Larrabee on a committee with Hawai`i Hilo Director of Athletics Bill Trumbo and Montana State Billings Director of Athletics Gary Gray to lay out the details of what the expanded conference would look like ahead of the next meeting in Dallas on January 7, 1996.
 
Four days before that meeting, Picone sent a letter to Commissioner Hahn with his own proposal for expansion that was drafted by the four schools from the PNWAC. Picone’s detailed proposal placed the four Hawai`i schools with the two Alaska schools and Western New Mexico in the Frontier Division. The Northwest Division included Western Washington, Seattle Pacific, Saint Martin’s, Central Washington, Lewis-Clark State and Montana State Billings.
 
On January 7, 23 individuals met with Commissioner Hahn in Dallas during the 90^th NCAA Convention. The seven current members of the conference were all represented along with the six potential additions as well as Western Oregon’s Jon Carey, who had attended meetings before even though Western Oregon had never been included in proposals. During that meeting, the group ratified the “intent” to work together in creating schedules for an expanded PacWest Conference with “a target date of April 1” for those schedules to be created.
 
Alaska Anchorage Director of Athletics Timothy Dillon, who was the president of the PacWest at the time, penned a letter to the membership a week after the meetings took place. He wrote “Progress was made toward the goal of expanding our league. I feel that the upcoming months are critical as we plan for the next four or five years.” He also noted that the goal was for the expansion to take place by the fall of 1997. Many ideas were suggested to make the schedule more feasible such as playing on consecutive days or eliminating mandatory interdivisional play while adding an eight-team conference tournament at the end of the season. He finally requested schools to “do what is best for the overall membership of the Pacific West Conference.”
 
Later that month on January 31, Picone wrote to Hahn again to inform him that “The four PNWAC schools met last week” to revise the proposal. The letter clarified two main points. First, the PNWAC schools opposed “rotating teams in and out of divisions” because it would create “confusion among media, boosters and alumni,” but would concede as long as those four schools always remained in the “Northwest Division.”
 
Picone then noted that leaving the PNWAC for the PacWest would incur a “significant increase in travel cost” for those schools, and said the clarified proposal was “bottom line for us to consider membership” in the PacWest. He concluded by saying “It is our hope that this compromised position will bring us closer to an agreement.”
 
The addition of the PNWAC schools was hardly guaranteed at that point. Commissioner Hahn made hand-written notes about possible futures for the PacWest, only the third page of which remains today. It is titled “Plan #3” and it says “Current conference members plus HPU & BYU [Hawaii].”
 
In preparation for the changing landscape of the conference, two changes were approved on September 18, 1995, to the conference’s bylaws that would become significant down the road.  First, the conference said that any member school could withdraw from the conference without penalty by notifying “the Commissioner on or before June 1 of any year” and that “the withdrawal shall become effective on the third July 1 following the notification of withdrawal.” Second, a four-year commitment was required of all new members, and failure to comply would be met with a penalty of $7,500. Previously, schools were only required to notify the conference 10 months before leaving and no financial penalty was involved.
 
The plan for expansion continued to evolve, but the hard work paid off in the summer of 1998, when seven new members joined the PacWest, which instantly doubled in size. Lewis-Clark State, Central Washington, Saint Martin’s and Western Washington all moved forward with their plan to switch from the PNWAC to the PacWest.
 
BYU-Hawaii and Hawai`i Pacific also joined the PacWest, marking the first time that the four Hawai`i schools were united in an NCAA Division II conference. Western Oregon left the Cascade Collegiate Conference to be part of the 1998 expansion, but the Wolves were one year behind the other schools in their application for NCAA membership. Humboldt State, which is now named Cal Poly Humboldt, also joined the conference making it the first time that the PacWest expanded into California. Today, the conference has included 11 member institutions in California and three affiliate members, making it now the most represented state in the PacWest.
 
Simon Fraser also joined the as a provisional member of the PacWest, which sponsored legislation that would allow Canadian schools to join the NCAA. The legislation did not pass the first time, but the PacWest’s work during that time laid the groundwork for Simon Fraser to eventually become a full member of NCAA Division II years later.
 
The 16 schools were divided into two divisions with the schools from Alaska, Hawai`i, Montana and New Mexico forming the Pacific Division. The Western Division was comprised of Central Washington, Humboldt State Lewis-Clark State, Saint Martin’s, Seattle Pacific, Simon Fraser, Western Oregon and Western Washington
 
It eventually became clear that the NCAA was not ready to welcome in Canadian schools, leaving Simon Fraser out, and Lewis-Clark State’s time in the PacWest was also short-lived. Lewis-Clark State's baseball reputation was a primary reason to eventually stay in the NAIA, which still hosts its national championship tournamet to this day at Lewis-Clark State. In the PacWest, Hawai`i Pacific and Hawai`i Hilo were the only other schools to sponsor baseball at the time and Hawai`i Hilo played in Division I.
 
Seattle University and Northwest Nazarene were then added into the PacWest’s membership to replace the two schools that exited. That kept the conference’s membership at eight members in each division for the 1999-00 academic year. The PacWest four schools from Hawaii, five schools from Washington, two from Idaho and Alaska, and one from California, New Mexico, Oregon and Montana.
 
The challenges that faced the conference were proportional to the size of its footprint, which itself was the main contributor to those challenges. Hawai`i Hilo, as it always has been, was literally on an island by itself. Similarly, the two Alaska schools are separated by 360 miles and are over 1,400 miles away from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Western New Mexico, Humboldt State and to a lesser degree Montana State Billings were not easy places to get to either. The result was increasing travel expenses and missed class time for student-athletes. Another challenge that was mentioned less often was that there were imbalanced schedules where teams played some opponents three times and others not at all, which complicated determining conference champions.
 
While a return to the PNWAC was likely not a viable option for the remaining schools that came out of that conference, there were now newfound relationships between the schools that comprised the Western Division, which included one of the PacWest’s eight charter schools: Seattle Pacific. While Lewis & Clark State gave up on the idea of being part of the PacWest entirely, the eight members of the Western Division tried to find another solution.
 
No later than during just the second year of the megaconference experiment, private conversations began among the Western Division schools to break off. One of the major catalysts for these conversations was when Hawai`i Pacific hosted the conference’s men’s basketball tournament. The Sharks had the best record in the regular season, earning the right to host the tournament. That meant the other qualifying schools had to buy last-second tickets to travel to Honolulu, which became a major hit in the budgets of several schools.
 
The eight schools of the Western Division agreed to break off from the PacWest and form their own conference. However, in order to avoid having to pay the fines for not following through on their four-year commitment and for not giving at least two years notice of the decision to leave the conference, they needed for the members of the PacWest to vote to dissolve the conference completely.
 
With only eight votes, the Western Division schools needed one more vote in order to dissolve the PacWest. They first turned to BYU-Hawaii and Hawai`i Pacific, which were both powerhouses in volleyball, to invite them to join the Western Division schools in forming a new conference. However, BYU-Hawaii president Eric Shumway refused the offer, insisting that the Hawai`i schools must stay together.
 
In the summer of 2000, the Western Division schools made the same offer to the two Alaska schools. Tim McDiffet, the associate athletic director at Alaska Anchorage later told reporters “We had a week to let them know if we were interested or not.” Both Alaska schools accepted the offer and joined in the plan to dissolve the PacWest.
 
However, news of the plan was unwittingly leaked from Alaska Anchorage to Montana State Billings just a week before the fall 2000 meetings in Seattle. That one-week advanced notice proved to give the six remaining Pacific Division schools a strategic advantage in the ensuing negotiations over the phone.
 
Even Commissioner Hahn was caught by surprise with the news that 10 of the PacWest’s members planned to disband the conference.
 
“I was angry when I found out,” Commissioner Hahn recalled. “Hawai`i Pacific called me to let me know that the Western Division schools planned to break off. I was partly mad because I was finding out through HPU.”
 
On September 25, 2000, one week prior to the conference’s fall meetings, the four Hawai`i schools along with Montana State Billings and Western New Mexico were informed that 10 of their fellow conference members would be voting to leave the conference and form their own. Western Washington President Karen Morse penned the letter that was signed by the president and athletic director of all 10 seceding schools and sent to the presidents of the six remaining institutions.
 
Morse began the letter by explaining the challenges that the conference faced, listing the cost of travel, missed class time and “tension between academic and athletic interests,” before concluding that “the attempt at sustaining a 16-member Pacific West Conference is not in its individual or collective best interests.” The third paragraph of the letter then delivered the decisive blow:
 
“Therefore, on behalf of the University of Alaska Anchorage, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Central Washington University, Humboldt State University, Northwest Nazarene University, Saint Martin’s College, Seattle University, Seattle Pacific University, Western Oregon University, and Western Washington University, this letter informs you of the intention to vote to dissolve the PacWest Conference and to affiliate in a reformatted conference of ten colleges and universities.”
 
The letter came attached with the following motion that would be voted on just a week later:
 
“Western Washington University moves that the Pacific West Conference be dissolved effective July 1, 2001; and that the Membership Council request that the Executive Council appoint an independent certified public accountant to examine the financial records of the Conference; and that the liabilities and assets of the Conference be divided equally among the member institutions pursuant to Article XI of the constitution.”
 
In the letter, Morse admitted that “This is a dramatic step and may be surprising, or even disappointing news to you. We do not believe it will be a surprise to the Athletic Directors who have labored tirelessly to try to make the PacWest work.” The ten schools also added that they “intend no disrespect to any individual institution and are cognizant of the impact that this action will have, especially on the six schools remaining.”
 
A second motion was attached to the letter that proposed two things. First, it would remove the requirement of the seceding schools to pay any penalty to the remaining schools for failure to comply with the requirements to give notice 25 months in advance of leaving the conference and to complete a four-year commitment to the conference. Second, it allowed the remaining schools to “maintain the Conference under its present name, Constitution and Bylaws.”
 
That second motion was the result of negotiations over the phone in the days between when the news was leaked and the letter was sent out, and that was the motion which eventually passed in the meeting in Seattle.
 
The reactions of the six remaining schools varied as they were hit with the news that the future of their athletics programs would change drastically in less than 12 months. On September 28, Montana State Billings Chancellor Ronald Sexton sent an emotional response to President Morse in which he stated “I am extremely disappointed in the lack of professionalism and the collegiately among those institutions that have initiated this action in a manner that would imply the Pacific West Conference belongs to a select few.”
 
Dr. Sexton took issue primarily with what he called “your secretive discussions” as he expressed his frustration that this decision was not discussed openly. In the letter he also summarized the hard work done by the schools in expanding the conference in the first place before noting “After many months of ongoing communication, both at the Pacific West Conference meetings and between these meetings, all new members were accepted and welcomed in good faith into the new and improved Conference.” He further argued that it was unfair for the seceding schools “to take with you two Pacific Division schools and considerable Conference assets,” and he expressed that he believed the 10 schools should have to pay the $7,500 fine.
 
Another issue that Dr. Sexton addressed deserves closer inspection. On May 8-9, 2000, which was four months before the Dr. Morse sent out her letter, the Membership Council met in the Seattle University Library for the annual spring meetings. On the agenda for the meeting were items such as scheduling, playoffs, officiating, transfer policies, etc. There was nothing on the agenda about the future of the conference. When Dr. Morse speculated that the decision to dissolve the conference wouldn’t be a surprise to the Athletic Directors, she added that they “nearly explored such a scenario at the May 2000 meeting of the PacWest Conference.” In Dr. Sexton’s letter, he cited that statement and then responded “It is my understanding no such discussion ever took place; therefore, I assume you mean that ten Athletic Directors almost raised the issue with the six other Athletic Directors but decided not to do so.”
 
A week after Dr. Sexton sent his reply, Montana State Billings Athletic Director Gary Gray told the Billings Gazette “We had heard some of the schools in the Northwest were concerned about the travel costs and the costs of being Division II. But, I had heard nothing at (recent) meetings. It all came fairly quickly.”
 
News leaked to the media as early as September 28, 2000 with the Honolulu Advertiser breaking the story that the PacWest was on the verge of a split. Dayton Morinaga wrote the article, which records the various reactions among the four Hawai`i schools. BYU-Hawaii Athletic Director Randy Day was quoted as saying “You could say it came as a shock to all of the Hawai`i schools, and the conference, for that matter. Something like this doesn’t happen overnight. Apparently, these schools must have had discussions about this for some time.” Day also summarized the hurt that was felt by the remaining schools in the days immediately after hearing the news by saying “We’re not particularly interested in scheduling them anytime soon. And we’re definitely not interested in subsidizing any of their travel costs if they do want to come.”
 
Chaminade Athletic Director Aaron Griess was able to find the positive side of the news. “I think this could actually be a good situation for us. It should be a plus financially.” Certainly, the same was not true for Montana State Billings.
 
Morinaga’s article also quoted the reaction of Hawai`i Pacific Athletic Director Tony Sellitto, who said “What concerns me is that they’re citing the financial costs of the trips, but a lot of these schools were playing us before we got into the conference. What, all of a sudden the cost went up after we got into the conference? No, not that I know of. We’re paying the same thing to fly up there to play them.” Morinaga was then quick to add that the Hawai`i schools gave unreciprocated subsidies to the mainland schools to travel to Hawai`i. Sellitto joined Griess in finding the positive side, adding “What’s important is for the Hawai`i schools to stick together. I believe the smaller the conference, the easier it is for everybody.” It should be pointed out that it was the expansion of the PacWest in the first place that put the four Hawaiian schools into the same conference.
 
Most newspapers waited until after the upcoming meetings to cover the story, but the Seattle Times also published an article on September 28 titled “PacWest Conference might break up.” The article quoted Seattle University Athletic Director Todd Schilperoort, who was new in his role and said he wasn’t sure what the reasons for leaving the conference were. Schilperoort did sign his name on the letter written by Dr. Morse.
 
The Membership Council Fall Meeting took place at the Sea-Tac Marriot on October 2. The only surviving copy of the agenda for that meeting mentioned nothing about the secession of the ten schools and must have been made prior to the letter being sent out. The biggest item on the agenda was approving schedules for the next four years, 2002-05. There was no proposed rotation of divisions for the next four years and teams in the Western Division would only have to travel to one pair of Pacific Division schools each year. That agenda must have been run through the shredder when Dr. Morse’s letter on behalf of the ten schools was circulated among the members.
 
The discussion at the meeting was short and straight to the point with Western Washington Athletic Director Lynda Goodrich being the one who ripped off the Band-Aid. She was reported to have said that “it was time” for the split to take place. The conversation lasted no more than five minutes, and then all 16 schools voted unanimously to approve the second motion.
 
The 10 seceding schools went on to form what is now the Great Northwest Athletic Conference. Today, the GNAC has 10 members, which are all former PacWest schools including Simon Fraser, which the GNAC brought in as the first Canadian member of the NCAA. Montana State Billings stayed in the PacWest for four more years, but eventually was reunited with the Western Division schools in the GNAC after a short stint in the Heartland Conference. Seattle University left the GNAC to go to NCAA Division I and Humboldt State eventually joined the CCAA.
 
Part 3 of the PacWest history series will be released out on August 4, and it will look at the period of time from 2001 when the PacWest's remaining six members hit the reset button until 2008 when new commissioner Bob Hogue completed his first year at the helm of the conference.
 
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)