By Ken Goe for DyeStat 

Photos by Crash Kamon

An era comes to an end this weekend at the Pac-12 Track & Field Championships in Boulder, Colo.  

The three-day meet begins at 11 a.m. (MDT) at the University of Colorado’s Potts Field. More than a meet will end when competition concludes Sunday.

As the dust settles from the 4x400 relay and team trophies are awarded, the conference that produced legends such as Steve Prefontaine, Gerry Lindgren, Henry Rono, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Florence Griffith-Joyner, Gail Devers, Quincy Watts, Dick Fosbury, Mac Wilkins, Ashton Eaton and Galen Rupp will disappear into history.  

What comes next isn't totally clear. What is clear is the Pac-12's track tradition has become so much collateral damage in the mad scramble for football television revenue.  

“I’m sad to see it end,” said Vin Lananna, now coach at Virginia who ran the Stanford program from 1992 to 2003, and Oregon’s from 2005 to 2012.   

Lananna guided Stanford to the 2001 Pac-12 men’s title and began a virtual dynasty at Oregon that stretched from 2007 to 2022 by winning the men’s title in 2007.  

The roots of the Pac-12 date to 1915. The conference existed in various iterations until reforming as the Pac-8 in 1964 with Cal, Oregon, Oregon State, UCLA, USC, Stanford, Washington and Washington State. It became the Pac-10 in 1978 with the addition of Arizona and Arizona State, and the Pac-12 in 2010 with Colorado and Utah.  

By the fall of 2024, Oregon, Washington, UCLA and USC will be in the Big Ten, Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah in the Big 12, and Cal and Stanford in the ACC.  

Left in what was once the premier collegiate conference on the West Coast will be Oregon State and Washington State. 

Oregon State coach Louie Quintana has been fighting uphill in Corvallis since 2017 to improve both his women-only program and the OSU facility, the Whyte Track and Field Center. The Beavers had to pass on an opportunity to host the conference meet last year because of delays in the Whyte Center’s construction.  

The 1,200-seat facility is complete now. It’s the conference that has unraveled.  

Quintana says he thought the Pac-12 might award the conference meet to OSU this year as a reward for grit and perseverance, even though it’s Colorado’s turn in the rotation. The Beavers haven’t hosted since bringing back their women’s program in 2004.  

“I didn’t voice my concern or say anything about it in a Pac-12 meeting,” Quintana said. “I was just hoping that since we’ve never hosted, and this being the final year, we would get an opportunity. ... It would have been nice for someone to notice. I felt like we were just sort of invisible in the room.”  

OSU and WSU will compete as members of the West Coast Conference in cross country in 2024 and 2025. But the WCC doesn’t sponsor track. The two schools are on their own for the indoor and outdoor seasons.  

Truth is, the indoor and outdoor regular seasons won’t change much for any of the current Pac-12 programs. The days of epic dual meets between, say, Oregon and UCLA, have gone the way of cinder tracks and Bill Bowerman’s waffle iron.  

The regular season for most programs involves sending out athletes from each event group to whatever meet provides the best competition. On a recent weekend in April, for instance, the Oregon Ducks shipped competitors to Corvallis, Philadelphia, Tucson and Des Moines, Iowa.  

That isn’t likely to change with the Ducks in the Big Ten. Perhaps the only noticeable difference will be the Big Ten Indoor Championships. The Pac-12 didn’t formally sponsor indoor track. 

When Lananna was at Oregon, he tried to build a team to win conference outdoor championships. But winning a conference meet doesn’t necessarily help a team succeed on the national level. Sometimes, it hurts.  

Former UO women’s coach Tom Heinonen said on at least one occasion, he rested some of his top athletes for the conference meet because the Ducks had designs on a national title. That could be a regular practice within the new conference alignments, especially for the four incoming West Coast schools.  

“It probably will be easier to win the Big Ten than it ever was the Pac-12,” Heinonen said. “But the trip is sure long. “I don’t see the Big Ten saying, ‘We want to come to (Oregon’s) Hayward Field every spring for the conference championship.’” 

Or vice versa. Why take a full team from the West Coast to Ann Arbor, Mich., for the Big Ten meet when you can stay out of airplanes and tune up your top athletes at home for the upcoming NCAA regional qualifiers.  

Traveling a team capable of winning a conference title from Eugene or Seattle to the Eastern Time Zone, or from State College, Penn., to Eugene, Oregon “is a big expense for a track program,” Heinonen said. “Virtually all programs are combined now. The numbers are pretty big.”  

By contrast, getting to a Pac-12 conference meet was no more than a two-hour, direct flight for most schools.  

For Oregon State and Washington State it won’t be an issue. Quintana said the Beavers are finalizing plans for an invitational in Corvallis on the weekend everyone else is at a conference championships.  

“We’ll start recruiting some post-collegians,” he said. “It’s the time of year where it might be nice for them to have another race. It’s the off-weekend for Division II, Division III and the NAIAs, so it could be last chance meet for some of them. It’s too big of a hole in our schedule not to have something.”