Farewell, Pac-12

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Caitlin Lowe remembers stepping into the batter’s box to face UCLA’s Keira Goerl, fighting alongside her Arizona softball teammates to scratch across a run or two against the stingy Bruins ace. She remembers her teammate Kristie Fox — the “clutch queen” — coming up with game-changing hits when the Wildcats most needed a boost. She remembers matching up against her sisters when coach Mike Candrea’s championship-winning teams traveled north to play Oregon State, and she remembers her travel-ball youth, when she and everyone else just wanted to someday play for Arizona, UCLA or another Pac-12 juggernaut. 

Well, Pac-10, back then. 

The conference was prestigious in the eyes of Lowe and her Orange County, California youth teammates, almost all of whom ended up at either Arizona or UCLA. Even now, having played, won (prolifically) and coached in the conference, she describes the Pac-12 as the “full package”: a place where you could compete, sure, but also turn into a full-fledged adult, prepared to make the most of life after college sports. 

“We obviously don’t want to see it go,” she says.

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But go it now has. The conference will undergo seismic shifts beginning this fall, when its membership dwindles to just two holdout programs: OSU and Washington State.

The “Conference of Champions” has laid claim to more team national titles than any other; when Washington took it all in the 2017 rowing campaign, it was No. 500 for the legacy league. And departing members Stanford, UCLA and USC — the first bound for the ACC, the last two for the Big 10 — are the winningest programs in all of Division I. 

Not to mention Arizona, a program that got in on the Pacific Coast fun in 1978, realigning from the Western Athletic Conference alongside rival-in-chief Arizona State, who will now two-step with the ’Cats to their next stop, the Big 12. 

Arizona’s 46-year history with the conference, and the numerous trophies earned along the way, could fill a chapter — or a whole book unto itself.

There were, of course, the moonshot softball years — home-run performances for the likes of Lowe and her peers. The Wildcats won it all nationally in — get ready — ’91, ’93, ’94, ’96, ’97, ’01, ’06 and ’07, the last two with Lowe’s steady glove in center field. This school in the Southwest also reached the pantheon in baseball and women’s golf (three times each) and men’s golf, women’s and men’s swimming and diving, and men’s basketball (once each) during the Pac-10/12 era. That’s you, Lute Olson and the 1997 Wildcats. 

Or as Lowe puts it in her office at McKale: “We’ve had legends walk through these halls, absolute legends” — folks with “way more to show for it,” she adds, “than just those championship banners.” Again, she says, it’s about the shaping of people through sport. 

The conference had a story before Arizona, though, and may have a story after Arizona and nine of its former Pac-12 compatriots bolt for league play — and TV cash — elsewhere. Go back to 1916 for the origin point: to the Imperial Hotel in Portland, Oregon, where charter members Washington, Oregon, Cal-Berkeley and Oregon Agricultural College (OSU today) hatched plans to roll out the balls and compete. 

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The Pac-12 began, yes, as the Pac-4, though back then the league eschewed something so changeable as a number, going by a simpler name: the Pacific Coast Conference, or the PCC. Soon after, it was the PCC still, but with a couple new faces (Wazzu, Stanford), and later still came other names both formal and informal: the Athletic Association of Western Universities, the Big Five and Big Six, and the Pac-8, before the Arizona schools came knocking at the conference door. 

One constant through the shakeups: a Rose Bowl berth for the league’s crowned football team (1917-2023). 

Arizona and ASU used to tussle and train in the Border Conference, a league that dissolved way back in 1963. They faced off against NAU and UTEP (well, Texas Western) and Hardin-Simmons (now a Division IIIer) in those bygone days — which is to say that change has and will come, ever and again. 

Arizona’s Pac-10/12/pick-a-number days might be over, but who knows where the league may end up next? 

And as for the Big 12-bound ’Cats? Lowe: “We’re just rolling with the punches.” And: “trying to make our mark.”