Rowing News | Death knell for Pac-12 rowing

Washington, Oregon, USC and UCLA will join the Big Ten, while Oregon State and Washington State will, according to recent reports, remain in the rest of the Pac-12 and play 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, this makes little sense. The Pac-12 Regatta was the only major championship where men’s and women’s teams competed on the same day at the same venue, and it was the best in both recent memory and history.

On the men’s side, Cal (2023) and Washington (2024) have won the heavyweight competitions at the IRA National Championship Regatta the past two years. Washington has won the James Ten Eyck Memorial Trophy for team points 18 times, more times than any other program in the IRA’s 121 years.

On the women’s side, a Pac-12 school has finished first or second at the NCAA Championships every year since 2012. They have won the NCAA Division I Championship 11 times since its inception in 1997 and have finished second 14 times.

“It’s definitely very meaningful for our program to win the last Pac-12 title,” said Washington coach Michael Callahan, whose Huskies won their 41st and final Pac-12 league title at Lake Natoma in May.

“It’s bittersweet. It’s one of the few college championships where men and women row together, and that’s probably not going to happen again in the Big Ten in the future.”

“It’s sad that the Pac-12 is coming to an end,” said Scott Frandsen, head coach of the Cal men’s team, who, like Callahan, competed in the Pac-12 as a student at the school he now coaches.

“When we got into the Big Ten, my first call was to Scott Frandsen and I told him, ‘We’re going to row the meet,'” Callahan said of the history-making race between the bitter rivals and the two best rowing programs in the country. “It’s a pillar of our program — and hopefully their program — and we’re going to continue that tradition and that race first and foremost.”

The loss of the Pac-12 Regatta could also be a silver lining as rowing programs find their place and opportunities in the changing world of college sports.

“We need to move forward, and this could be an opportunity,” said the IRA’s Callahan. “It’s not all negative. It could be an opportunity to take a fresh look at men’s rowing, rowing in general, and college rowing in the United States. How can we make it better?”

“The landscape of college sports is so dynamic. There will be a lot of upheaval, as there have been before, and that will likely continue for the next 18 months. It will look different every fall for the next few years. And we have to be prepared for that. We have to be resilient. We have to be able to adapt quickly. I think rowing will remain more of a regional thing.”

​Cals Frandsen agrees. “We will find ways to further expand our West Coast championship.”