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The West Coast Conference is an NCAA collegiate Athletic conference consisting of eight member schools in California , Oregon , and Washington . It was founded in 1952 as the '''California Basketball Association''' by a group of five schools in the San Francisco Bay Area , and became the West Coast Conference in 1956 . All of the current members are private, religiously-affiliated institutions; four of the eight are Jesuit , and only Pepperdine is not Catholic . It is also a remarkably stable union in the constantly changing world of college athletics. The WCC has not had a school join or leave the conference since 1980 . Only two conferences, the Ivy League and the Pac-10 , have remained unchanged for a longer period of time. The WCC participates in NCAA Division I and is considered to be one of the better Mid-major conferences in the country. The conference sponsors 13 sports but does not include Football as one of them. In fact, San Diego is the only conference member that still plays football at any level; the rest have all dropped the sport, some as early as the 1940s , before the conference existed ( Gonzaga and Portland ), and one as late as 2003 ( Saint Mary's ). The WCC's strongest sports historically have been Soccer (nine national champions, including back-to-back women's soccer titles in 2001 and 2002 ) and Tennis (five individual champions and one team champion). The conference has also made its presence felt nationally in men's Basketball , with San Francisco winning two consecutive national titles in the 1950s with all-time great Bill Russell , Loyola Marymount's inspired NCAA tournament run in 1990 following the tragic death of Hank Gathers during that season's WCC championship tournament, and most recently Gonzaga's rise to national prominence since 1999's Cinderella run to the Elite 8. Gonzaga has made it to the NCAA tournament each year since then. CURRENT MEMBERS Athletic logos and nicknames EXTERNAL LINKS |