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:
“There be some sports are painful, and their labor
Delight in them sets off. Some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters
Point to rich ends.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“In the end, I think you really only get as far as you’re allowed to get.”
—Gayle Gardner, U.S. sports reporter. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 87 (June 17, 1991)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)