Needing to add two sports by the 2005 season to comply with NCAA regulations, Pacific West Conference commissioner Woody Hahn said his league will be adding men's and women's golf in 2004. PacWest to expand
with golf in 2004By Jerry Campany
jcampany@starbulletin.com"Golf is definitely a shoo-in," Hawaii Pacific athletic director Russell Dung said. "I think golf will open up a lot more opportunities for student-athletes here to continue on into college and there are so many golf courses here, it is a natural."
Hawaii's four schools -- Hawaii Pacific, Brigham Young-Hawaii, Chaminade and Hawaii-Hilo -- have agreed to add golf teams, but have not had time to begin searching for home courses or coaches. Hawaii-Hilo already has a men's golf team that competed in an NCAA Division II west regional last year but had a Division I schedule.
The decision to add golf might be easy compared to the pains the schools that make up the conference are facing. The PacWest will have to add another sport the following year and continues to address the issue of expansion since it is as small a conference as the NCAA will allow. A moratorium on adding Division II schools was just lifted this past summer.
"We are very anxious to add teams," Hahn said. "We hope to add some that are equidistant to Billings (Mont.) and Silver City (N.M.). We have talked to people, but it's not easy because there is still a little bit of a shakeup."
As for the final sport to be added in 2005, bowling, women's basketball and riflery were mentioned at a meeting of conference officials at Hilo last weekend. Women's bowling seems to be in the lead because of the small number of roster spots and because it can be scored electronically, meaning Montana State-Billings and Chaminade could compete with each other without leaving their home lanes.
The conference's two mainland teams, Montana State-Billings and Western New Mexico, had their own ideas on what sport should be added. Both already compete in women's basketball and hoped to jump their teams over to the PacWest. Hawaii-Hilo athletic director Kathleen McNally agrees that bowling may not be the way to go.
"We (the conference) are looking at women's bowling," McNally said. "That is humorous and not going to solve any of our problems. To me, and this is the mainland part of me speaking, one of the things we need to look at is women's basketball or women's soccer, sports of that magnitude that would make us regionally visible and legitimize our program. There are a lot of facility problems, but those kinds of sports at least give us some shot of gaining revenue."
The facility problem is a real one, as Chaminade, Hawaii Pacific and Hawaii-Hilo are struggling for facilities to accommodate the sports they currently have.
But for all of the decisions the six schools face, it is nothing as difficult as what they have conquered before.
After the 2000 season, 10 members of the conference bolted to create the Great Northwest Conference, leaving the PacWest to die. Now, not only is the PacWest alive and well, Hahn says it is only getting stronger.
"I am as happy as I can be with the six-team conference," Hahn said. "The main thing is that all of the schools we have are solid and want to stick together. We're in it together, we compete on the courts but we are friends off of them."
It was also decided at the meeting to cancel the conference championship in cross country this year, because the PacWest only has five schools that field cross country teams. The meet was scheduled for Oct. 26 at a site to be determined.
Hawaii Pacific hosted it last year, when it was not recognized as a championship, but Montana State-Billings competed as a show of good faith.
Western New Mexico will field a cross country team beginning in 2004, when the championship will be held again at a revolving site.
Runners need to compete in four sanctioned events to be eligible for regionals, and HPU's women's team has been plagued by injuries -- No. 2 runner Sayuri Kusutani has not practiced this week due to a pain in her hip and No. 1 Nina Christensen missed a meet last week.
So the four Hawaii schools are considering holding a "Hawaii championship" this year during the weekend the PacWest championships were to be held.