The University of Washington’s 2024 Pac-12 rowing championship will be the last one ever, as most of the member schools of the Pac-12 leave for other conferences. It’s a result of the college sports world’s chaotic conference realignments as schools chase massive TV-rights payouts.
Washington, Oregon, USC, and UCLA will join the Big Ten, while the latest reports have Oregon State and Washington State remaining in what’s left of the Pac-12 and playing football games against schools in the Mountain West conference.
Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah will join the Big 12. Cal and Stanford—which row on waters that flow directly into the Pacific Ocean—will join the Atlantic Coast Conference.
From a rowing perspective, it makes little sense. The Pac-12 regatta was the only major championship to feature men’s and women’s collegiate varsity programs competing at the same venue on the same day. Both recently and historically, they were the best.
On the men’s side, Cal (2023) and Washington (2024) swept the heavyweight events at the IRA National Championship Regatta the last two years. Washington has won the James Ten Eyck Memorial Trophy for team points 18 times, more than any other program in the IRA’s 121 years.
On the women’s side, a Pac-12 school has been first or second at the NCAA championships every year since 2012. They’ve won 11 of the NCAA Division I championships since its inception in 1997 and finished second 14 times.
“It’s definitely very meaningful to our program to win the last Pac-12,” said Washington coach Michael Callahan, whose Huskies earned their 41st, and last, Pac-12 league title on Lake Natoma in May.
“It’s bittersweet. It’s one of the only collegiate conference championships with men and women rowing together, and that probably won’t happen going forward in the Big Ten.”
“It’s sad that the Pac-12 is coming to a close,” said Cal men’s head coach Scott Frandsen, who, like Callahan, raced in it as an undergraduate at the school he now coaches.
“When we went into the Big Ten, the first phone call I made was to Scott Frandsen, saying, ‘We’re going to be rowing the dual,’” said Callahan of the storied race between the fierce rivals and the country’s best two men’s rowing programs. “That is a pillar of our program—and hopefully their program, too—and we’re going to continue that tradition and that race first and foremost.”
The loss of the Pac-12 regatta might have a silver lining as rowing programs figure out their place and opportunities in the changing world of intercollegiate athletics.
“We need to evolve, and it might be an opportunity,” said Callahan at the IRA. “It’s not all negative. It might be a way to re-look at men’s rowing, rowing in general, and United States collegiate rowing. How do we improve it?
“The landscape of intercollegiate athletics is so dynamic. There’s going to be a lot of disruption, as there has been already, and it’s going to continue probably for the next 18 months. It’s going to look different every fall we show up for the next few years. And so we have to be prepared for that. We have to be resilient. We have to be able to adapt quickly. I think rowing will stay more regional.”
Cal’s Frandsen agrees. “We’ll find ways to continue to have our West Coast championship.”
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