The West Coast Conference became an 11-team league on July 1 when Oregon State and Washington State — long-time residents of the Pac-12 — joined the league as affiliate members for the next two years.

The result is an 11-team WCC that will grow to 13 institutions at the start of the 2025-26 school year when Grand Canyon University and Seattle University become permanent members.

Then the conference membership will drop back down to 11 institutions a year later as OSU and WSU depart, hoping by then to have found a permanent home that resolves their football needs.

If the movement within the WCC — and everywhere in college athletics — has your head spinning a bit, you’re not alone.

Gonzaga women’s basketball coach Lisa Fortier is excited to have the Beavers and Cougars join the WCC. But she acknowledged all the change is a lot to digest. And she has no idea when the merry-go-round will stop.

“Right now, who knows what’s going to happen in two years,” Fortier said. “It is a little bit odd. But who knows what college basketball is going to be in two years. It could be that football is whatever and basketball is regional. Or it could be any of a number of things we haven’t even thought of.”

For now, the WCC prepares for 2024-25 as an 11-team conference, and the consensus is that’s a good thing. Primarily, the league’s coaches say, the two additions improve the WCC’s competitive strength and make scheduling easier.

“It gives us more good teams, more good depth in our league,” Saint Mary’s men’s basketball coach Randy Bennett said. 

“In some ways you can look at it and say our league just got a lot tougher,” Portland women’s basketball coach Michael Meek said, suggesting the WCC may now be the premier women’s basketball conference in the West. “I would think the (computer ranking) in our league is going to strengthen that much more.”

The additions comes after the WCC played the 2023-24 academic year with just nine schools, due to the departure of BYU. That needed to change, WCC Commissioner Stu Jackson said. 

“The presidents of the WCC were adamant about not remaining at nine members,” said Jackson, explaining that OSU and WSU fit into the WCC’s geographic footprint and, as a result, minimize travel costs. ”We’re not traveling across the country to get conference games, which as we’ve seen has been the movement over the last 11 months.”

The breakup of the Pac-12, for instance, has sent four schools to the Big Ten, four to the Big 12 and two to the ACC, meaning that teams from the West Coast will be playing conference games at such distance locales as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida.

The addition of Oregon State and Washington State gives the WCC four schools in the two Northwest states along with seven in California. 

But geography alone didn’t create the marriage between OSU and WSU and the WCC. 

“The value with the institutions is stark in terms of they enter the WCC both with very good academic reputations, which aligns with our current full-time members,” said Jackson, now in his second year as the league’s commissioner. “Certainly they will provide another level of competitiveness and strength to our conference for the next two years. 

“That hopefully will result in improving the overall competitive metrics for the sports that they’re joining and in turn provide even more access to NCAA championships.”

The newcomers will participate in 12 sports in the WCC, including men’s and women’s basketball. Both will compete in women’s soccer, volleyball, men’s golf, women’s golf, women’s cross country and rowing. Oregon State will also participate in men’s soccer and softball, and Washington State will challenge its new WCC rivals in women’s tennis and men’s cross country.

Bennett, whose Saint Mary’s teams have resided at the top of the WCC along with powerhouse Gonzaga for the past two decades, believes WSU and OSU will enhance the competitive level of the WCC.

“Washington State had a really good team last year. That would be a Quad 1 game on the road,” he said, referring to the rating the NCAA gives to high-level games on a team’s schedule. The Cougars were 25-10 last year and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

They lost forward Jaylen Wells to the NBA, point guard Myles Rice to the University of Indiana and coach Kyle Smith to Stanford. But new coach David Riley brought in seven transfers, four of them who combined to average nearly 48 points at his previous stop at Eastern Washington, which won 21 games last season. 

“They lost a lot of guys, but they’re bringing in the guys from Eastern Washington and they won the Big Sky,” Bennett said. “They will raise the level of competition in our league.”

Oregon State has struggled the past three seasons but reached the NCAA regional finals as recently as 2021. The team lost its top three scorers from last season, led by sophomore guard Jordan Pope.

“Nowadays, it’s hard to project exactly what a team will be,” Bennett said, alluding to the transfer portal’s ability to completely remake teams. “They go in the portal and get some guys. They could get better or they could be worse.”

Meek, who led Portland to the WCC Tournament title and an NCAA berth last season, believes the addition of WSU and OSU will have double-edged impact on the conference. 

“For the majority of our league, it makes it a lot tougher to make a run to get to the NCAA Tournament. In that regard, it’s going to create much more of a challenge,” Meek said.

“The other side of it is we’re bringing in two programs from a talent standpoint and with two really good coaches should finish near the top of the league. That help make our league, makes us tougher.”

The Beavers were 27-8 last season and reached the Elite 8 before losing to South Carolina, then losing three key players to the transfer portal. WSU won 21 games and beat WCC regular-season champion Gonzaga 77-72 in overtime early in the season. Three of the Cougars’ top five scorers are returning.

“Both teams, I think, are going to be really good,” Meek said.

“They’re two very quality basketball programs,” Fortier echoed. “We schedule Washington State every year, partially because of proximity but also because it’s a really good game. I’m very excited to have both of them in our conference.”

Santa Clara women’s soccer team Jerry Smith expects WSU to challenge for WCC honors next season. “It’s a positive,” he said. “I would imagine all of the sports at Santa Clara would be thrilled to have these two teams.”

The benefits to the WCC won’t stop with basketball and soccer, Jackson said. “Up and down the line, these institutions are going to make the WCC better.”

Smith, whose program has produced 13 WCC titles, two national championships and Olympians Brandi Chastain, Julie (Johnston) Ertz, Danielle Slaton and Aly Wagner, said the move has great benefits to scheduling.

With just nine teams last season, WCC women’s soccer teams were forced to either take a week off before the start of conference play or play two non-conference games against WCC rivals that week. Having Oregon State and Washington State come in solves that problem. 

Jackson expects the same impact in most sports.

“Quite simply, it’s going to make it easier to schedule,” he said. “The difficulty in scheduling we’ve experienced as a nine-team conference over the past year has been profound. Adding two more institutions, it’s two less non-conference games you need to add. 

“And you still get the benefit of playing two members who are likely stronger than many of the non-conference opponents. That’s across many sports.”

Smith, who has been coaching for nearly four decades, acknowledges this is “an interesting time” in college sports.

“By the time this phone call is over it probably will have changed again somehow,” he said during the interview. “And because of that, you just adopt a philosophy of being flexible. It keeps everybody on their toes. It forces us to grow. If you’re not, you’re going to get run over.”