Pac-12 basketball teams preparing to take final bow

Conference play ends with women’s, men’s tournaments.

L A S VEGAS — Tara VanDerveer managed to compartmentalize her emo- tions as she chased down and eclipsed Mike Krzyze- wski’s all-time wins record earlier this season, deter- mined to focus only on the moment ahead.

And that’s how the Hall of Fame coach is approaching the final Pac-12 Conference women’s basketball tour- nament.

Or perhaps it’s just too painful to think about this power conference really making the big split at sea- son’s end.

“I just can’t even wrap my head around that,” said VanDerveer, whose Stanford team moved up to No. 2 in the latest AP Top 25 rankings.

VanDerveer, the face of modern-day Pac-12 basket- ball, isn’t alone in her feel- ings. Her resume of three national championships over nearly four decades gives her words added weight as the self-labeled “Conference of Champions” says goodbye to a historic past with its men’s and women’s tournaments.

No longer tying together the teams is a conference history that includes UCLA’ run of 10 national champion- ships in 12 years under John Wooden wi h stars Lew Alcin- dor (later Kareem Abdul-Jab- bar) and Bill Wa ton. Or USC’s Cheryl Miller becoming the Naismith Player of the Year three times while elevating women’s basketball onto the national stage.

The conference’s more recent history isn’t as glorious, but in 2021, Stanford’s women beat Arizona by a single point in an all-Pac-12 national title game. And the UCLA men made the Final Four the same season before losing to Gonzaga on a banked-in, buzzer-beat- ing heartbreaker from near midcourt.

Maybe each side will go out on a high note this year.

No. 5 Arizona is the clear front-runner on the men’s side, which plays its con- ference tournament March 13-16. Six ranked teams, including three in the top 10, make up the Pac-12 wom- en’s tournament, which runs today through Sunday.

“This conference is one of the most competitive in the country,” Stanford graduate student Hannah Jump said. “I think you can’t really go into any game and think, ‘Oh, we’ve got this one.’ It’s just going to prepare us for down the road, with the NCAA Tournament coming up (and) Pac-12 tournament.”

After those tournaments, attention turns to the future as 10 schools depart, four each for the Big Ten and Big 12 and two — Stanford and Bay Area rival California — for the Atlantic Coast Con- ference. Only Oregon State and Washington State will remain, though they will continue to play under the Pac-12 banner even while aligning with the mid-major West Coast Conference for basketball.

“I’m really sad that our conference won’t exist because I think it’s the best conference in college ath- letics,” California women’s coach Charmin Smith said. “But the fact that we’re going to the same conference (ACC with Stanford) ... we’ll still have this rivalry.”

Because their conference tournament is first, the Pac-12 women’s teams will have to deal wi h the massive change that’s to come a little sooner. Coaches and players were asked in recent weeks what the end of this era means while the men’s teams will likely face similar inquiries.

“We all grew up with the Pac-8, Pac-10, Pac-12, and to see it go away is something sad,” Arizona men’s coach Tommy Lloyd said. “But I’m also excited for new hori- zons, so we’re not going to get sentimental about it. You and I can get sentimental at the end of the year and shed a tear, but now it’s business.”