Pac-12 Media Day: Women's basketball coaches lament upheaval (though less so on main stage)

LAS VEGAS — Moved to a corridor of generic Las Vegas Strip hotel ballrooms from its trendy old office building in San Francisco, the Pac-12 women’s basketball media day mostly still retained its usual atmosphere of showiness and camaraderie Tuesday.

Video and music blared. Glass-enclosed basketballs painted in team colors stared at the main stage media audience. Uniformed players bounced around between interviews, playing ping pong, pop-a-shot, chatting amiably or just checking their phones.

Questions on the main podium mostly kept up a convivial vibe, some regarding personal notes and many discussing upbeat projections about the players and coaches sitting there.

Other than what legendary Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer called a "nightmare," the league's impending demise after this season, words such as “break-up” or “realignment” or “football” or “television” were otherwise not widely heard.

“I think that was kind of by design,” Oregon coach Kelly Graves said.

Besides, USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb said it would be a “disservice” to talk about it at a time when coaches prefer to focus on their teams and players for the season ahead.

“And none of us were really prepared to debrief everything that happened,” she said.

But it did happen. One final run in 2023-24, the league’s tight-knit participants will be heading off to the Big Ten, Big 12, ACC and, for Washington State and Oregon State, parts unknown.

“Personally, I was really disappointed,” Graves said. “The last seven or eight years, this has been the premier conference.”

It was, maybe in part at least, because they built it together. That’s the sort of thing many Pac-12 coaches preferred to talk about Tuesday when asked about the league’s break-up during the more private “breakout room” interviews.

“I mean, we used to be Tara VanDerveer and the 11 dwarfs,” UCLA coach Cori Close said. “I remember back when Mike Neighbors was the coach at University of Washington, and he came in and said `This is how we need to schedule to move our conference forward,’ … so my whole thing is just you want to you want to be a part of something bigger than yourself and you want to be a part of leaving a legacy of excellence.”

UA coach Adia Barnes said her focus was only on her team and what could be the “best Pac-12 basketball in history.”

Of course, teams such as Arizona, Oregon, UCLA and USC will probably be fine, traditionally strong programs who are heading off to other power conferences with the resources to fly charter going wherever they are sent next.

Then there’s Oregon State and Washington State, left standing without a chair when the music ended, despite the Beavers having won the conference three seasons in a row and reaching the 2016 Final Four under Rueck, and despite the Pac-12 Tournament title that Kamie Ethridge guided the lightly-funded Cougars to last season.

There is no rug under them.

“I can be sad. I could get frustrated. I could be mad. I could be all those things,” Rueck said. “You know, emotions are real, and at one point I probably went through all of those. But it does me no good to stay there. That’s just the reality of it. Like, how long can you be mad? You just have to accept it. So let's make the best plays that we can make within our new reality, whatever framework that might be.”

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Rueck said the hardest part is the uncertainty, with he and Ethridge unable to tell recruits and their families much about the future to speak of other than what’s in their gym and on their campus. OSU and WSU might somehow reformulate the conference by adding schools, or join some other league, while a lawsuit in the state of Washington hovers over it all.

“I have to equate it to experiencing the COVID stretch where we didn't know if we were gonna practice that day,” Rueck said. “There was so much uncertainty and and most of us probably never had that much uncertainty in our day to day life. There's just things I don't know. So what can you do? You do the best with what you've got.”

Though Ethridge had no way of knowing at the time, the Cougars’ surprise run to the Pac-12 Tournament title last season was key, allowing her to at least sell recruits and their families on the idea that the Cougars, no matter what is going on around them, are making progress despite their financial limitations.

“I tell people, `We were 12th in the league in budgets, we’re 12th in the league in facilities, even though they're really nice — and we won the Pac-12 championship,' ” Ethridge said. “So it doesn’t doesn't really matter if you get the right people. We have great people.”

But the Cougars and Beavers, and everyone else really, won’t have each other anymore as a Pac-12 unit. That’s a gut punch that even VanDerveer, who saw unparalled competition infiltrate a conference she once routinely dominated, has trouble with.

“It's heartbreaking. This has been my whole life,” VanDerveer said. “I woke up when I heard about it, and I said, I'm in a bad dream. This is a nightmare.

“But we are committed to this year being a great year. We're really thankful that we have such support in the in the Pac 12 from everyone we play. We represent great universities and we're very proud of the success that we have had. We're just gonna make it the best year ever.”

“I feel greatly privileged that I've been a part of an era of women's basketball in this conference that we can be really proud of. And there's a lot of people that have contributed to that. I think this is going to be a year to say thank you in all those ways."