Thanks to the Pac-12! After the Pac-12 schools left the MPSF and Fresno State dropped the sport the Aggie and Aztec women were the last two teams in the MPSF. Even the MPSF dropped the sport this past season relegating those two teams to independent status. I'm surprised more colleges don't add women's lacrosse as a Title IX equalizer. It is a fast growing sport in high schools.

Looks like Teresa Gould is doing quite well these days. Now a top as administrator at the pac 12. Where is her husband now?

Ron Gould, per Wikipedia is an assistant at Stanford. Looks like he and Tommy Nicholson are on opposite career paths.

I saw he is using a cane, hopefully temporary.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked Ron Goulds personality and he recruited very well. I just think his coaching ability was very limited. I wish him well. Teresa is obviously on a different track.

Perhaps Tommy Nicholson's wife (if he has one) will become UCD's nterim AD at some point. Then he and Ron Gould will truly be on opposite paths.

Would other sports be in consideration for joining the PAC-12?

This is a game changer in my opinion

Why? Which UCD teams can compete in a Power 5 school and be respectful?

If I'm not mistaken UC Davis was an affiliate member of the PAC-10 for wrestling.previously . It was the only official D-I program at the school when UCD was still D-II I believe, although water polo mostly played D-I programs.

Like with wrestling I think this is just the PAC-12 looking to fill out schedules since not all full members participate.

I think for the PAC-12 to add UCD as a full member it would require a major improvement in the football program and the stadium. If UCD could pull it off they would be happy to drop Colorado State or Utah.

Waterpolo both men and women were also D I before the transition. The men were in the WWPA but not sure if the women were in the BWC from the start I do remember the women's team playing at Schaal in the full NCAA tourney and winning a game or two. That was a very good very team!

I recall (and mind you, it's been a long time so my memory could be incorrect) athletic department releases in the 90's in which it was stated wrestling was the only Division I sport. I did wonder why they didn't talk about water polo, gymnastics, lacrosse, etc, teams that mostly played Division I opponents. Gymnastics won a championship, but it wasn't designated to my knowledge as D1 or D2. Was it specifically a conference championship then ? Not clear on that. Lacrosse almost exclusively played D-I programs due to lack of opponents.

The reason they said this was probably because the WWPA is one of those hybrid sport-specific conferences that crosses NCAA Divisions to have enough membership. If the Aggies (or the Tritons, who were a Division III institution at the time) won the conference they would certainly go to NCAA playoffs but to my knowledge those playoffs weren't separated by Division. So it's probably an official distinction made without there being a real difference.

But that doesn't answer the question of why UCD was Division I in wrestling if the PAC-10 for that sport also crossed division lines (SF State was in it too, weren't they ?) Only explanation I can think of is that the competition was sponsored by an established Division I conference as opposed to a non-divison sport-specific entity ? But then what about women's water polo ? No clue.

So what I have deduced from this discussion so far is that whoever sent out those publications back in the 90's either wasn't speaking accurately or they were excluding the sport-specific conferences from the conversation.

Pac 12 is always looking for wrestling schools. Right now only three full-fledged Pac-12 schools have wrestling teams; Stanford, Arizona State and Oregon State. To reach the minimum of 6 teams for NCAA purposes they've extended affiliate memberships to Cal Poly, CSU-Bakersfield and Arkansas-Little Rock. UC Davis used to be a Pac-12 affiliate in wrestling. I don't think SFSU ever was. They continue to wrestle at the D-2 level as a member (probably affiliate...) of the D-2 Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference where they went 0-5 this past year. I can only assume the Pac 12 requires a team to at least compete at the D-1 level to even be an affiliate member in any sport. That makes some sense and would explain why wrestling was the only acknowledged D-1 program at one time.

Cal Baptist is a struggling D-1 wrestling program. They will be wrestling as an affiliate in the Big 12. Good luck to them there. Former UCD head coach Lenny Zalesky just announced his retirement as head coach at CBU. Derek Moore, UCD's only D-1 champion, has been named interim head coach.

(Wouldn't it make more sense for Cal Baptist to wrestle in the Pac 12 and Arkansas-Little Rock in the Big 12?)

Men's water polo, like men's volleyball, does not sponsor different levels of post season play. There is one single tournament. It is, as expected, dominated by the four California Pac 12 schools who compete in the Mountain West Sports Federation as there are not the required six teams and the conference has not seen fit to follow wrestling and offer affiliate memberships to other schools.

The small Southern California Schools, I think all of which are D-3, would send their conference water polo champion to the NCAA's with the expected result. A few years ago they created a post season national D-3 tournament and no longer competed in the NCAA post-season tourney. Not sure it that has survived the pandemic.

I doubt that inviting UCD and SDSU to join the Pac-12 for women's lacrosse is going to be a game changer in the near future. Not sure why the conference invited the schools other than as a courtesy and perhaps a scheduling convenience. You could put the schools in divisions similar to the football divisions with SDSU in a southern division and UCD in a northern one. They also have a history of competing against each other in the MPSF until Arizona State elevated its club lacrosse team to varsity and the conference now had six schools so the schools left the MPSF and established women's lacrosse as a conference sport. That and unlike men's water polo there are not a lot of other D-1 women's lacrosse programs, so UCD and SDSU were alone in the wilderness. There are a lot of men's water polo programs throughout California which are spread out over the Southern California Intercollegiate Conference, the Western Water Polo Ass'n and the Golden Sun Conference.