Sports
As of the 2010-11 season, the Big West sponsors intercollegiate competition in baseball, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s cross country, men’s and women’s golf, men’s and women’s soccer, softball, men’s and women’s tennis, men’s and women’s track and field, women’s volleyball, and women's water polo. As of 2010, the Big West has dropped men’s and women’s swimming and diving.
The Big West is strong in several sports. Baseball and Women's Volleyball have been the strongest sports because of the number of championships won. Cal State Fullerton has won 4 College World Series in 1979, 1984, 1995, and 2004. Long Beach State has won 5 Women's Volleyball championships in 1972, 1973, 1989, 1993, 1998, the last three being NCAA sanctioned titles. In 1998 Misty May-Treanor helped guided the 49ers to a 36-0 record on route to the program's most recent title. Pacific won back to back Women's Volleyball titles in 1985 and 1986.
When UNLV won the school's lone Division I Basketball Championship in 1990, by beating Duke University by a record setting margin of 30 points in the 103-73 victory, they were a member of the Big West Conference.
The current members of the Big West have won a total of nine NCAA national championships including UC Santa Barbara’s most recent Men’s Soccer Championship in 2006.
Read more about this topic: Big West Conference
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“Guys do not have a genetic blueprint that allows them to understand or love sports.”
—Lesley Visser, U.S. sports reporter and announcer. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 82 (June 17, 1991)
“Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behaviour, attire, grace, learning and all their words aimeth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The whole idea of image is so confused. On the one hand, Madison Avenue is worried about the image of the players in a tennis tour. On the other hand, sports events are often sponsored by the makers of junk food, beer, and cigarettes. What’s the message when an athlete who works at keeping her body fit is sponsored by a sugar-filled snack that does more harm than good?”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)