The Young and the rest of us

Beginning in the 2011-12 athletic season, the West Coast Conference (WCC) will extend beyond the West Coast. With Brigham Young University joining the conference, WCC members will compete in Provo, Utah, as far east as the conference has ever stretched.

"I think BYU is a great fit for us," WCC Commissioner Jamie Zaninovich said. "If you look at the competitive level across all their sports that will be joining the WCC, they'll come into the league competing at the top level but not necessarily as a dominant program."

With BYU looking to become an independent in football, the school needed a conference for its remaining NCAA teams (baseball, men's and women's basketball, men's and women's cross country, men's and women's golf, women's soccer, men's and women's tennis and women's volleyball). The Cougars initially planned to join the Western Athletic Conference (WAC), which became a less attractive move when Boise State, Fresno State and Nevada left the WAC, leaving it with only six teams for the 2012-13 athletic season.

"It certainly made us take a step back to re-evaluate things and dig a bit deeper," BYU Associate Athletic Director Duff Tittle said. "The more we looked into it, the more fascinated we were with how closely aligned the WCC was in many areas: the concern for academics, the overall philosophies of the universities, and the common link of faith-based schools."

Zaninovich reached out to BYU when news spread of the WAC changes in mid-August, and formal talks began a week later. Over a two-week negotiation period, BYU and the WCC had meetings involving athletic departments and school presidents.

"In conversations both as a group with the athletic directors and also individually with a couple of my peers, the vast majority of them were excited right from the initial concept," Gonzaga Athletic Director Mike Roth said.

"In concept, everybody was very positive about us pursuing the opportunity," Zaninovich added. "We had all of the momentum of our membership behind us for this move."

The WCC was aided by a system of guidelines for conference expansion it had worked on for roughly nine months prior to the move. Most important was that the new school be a private institution, and that it be in the western United States. Having the system in place prepared the WCC to react quickly when BYU was once again on the market, according to Zaninovich.

"[BYU] coming into our conference adds to the competitive profile of those sports, thus elevating the conference as a whole," Roth said. "One thing discussed in expansion that we wanted to avoid was bringing in a school that would negatively affect the overall competitiveness and national profile of the conference."

Although the conference's newest addition is not from a state on the West Coast, Tittle said one of the benefits of joining was travel, with respect to short transit time and ease of getting into the WCC cities. Additional benefits for BYU extend beyond simply getting to games and matches.

"Almost 60 percent of our alumni base is in those areas so we'll have a natural fan base there that is excited to see us come to town and anxious to see us compete in a variety of sports," Tittle said. "We also recruit a lot to those areas and it gives us a nice opportunity to tell people they can play in front of their families."

The conference is working on scheduling models for nine teams that will allow BYU not to compete on Sunday, a day of religious devotion in the Mormon faith. According to Roth, the WCC basketball championships will still be played at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas.

"The league tournament has being going on for the last 24 years, and in that period the format has changed a number of times," Roth said. "Accommodating a new member is different, but it's something we have adjusted in the past."

With an odd number of teams in the WCC, there is much speculation in the media that the conference will to add a 10th school. Such an addition would make it easier to design a suitable championship format.

"Everybody says you have to have a 10th school. I'm not sure I agree with that," Zaninovich said. "It really depends on your geography and how you schedule. We looked at some nine-school scheduling models going into this that are not the same as our current eight-school models, but certainly very doable. We have no specific plans to add more members right now, but we also didn't two months ago."

BYU is the second largest private school in the nation, with an enrollment of 32,955 students for the 2009-10 academic year. WCC enrollment last year ranged from roughly 3,000 (Portland) to 9,000 (Loyola Marymount).

"There are examples around the country of leagues being very functional with different size institutions within the league," Roth said. "Some are very functional with a mix of private and public schools."

Once everything is in place, Gonzaga and BYU's men's basketball teams will meet for the first time on the hardwood.

"I think that's going to be a real neat rivalry and one that will be very interesting not only within our conference, but nationally from a TV perspective," Zaninovich said. "People are going to circle the dates of that game on their calendar."

Expect that matchup sometime in January 2012.