Not everyone involved with Oregon basketball was ecstatic about having a Pacific-10 Conference postseason tournament for the 2000-01 season.
Duck head coach Jody Runge wasn’t happy to hear the news, despite all the indications that Oregon would be the leading contender to host the first-ever women’s postseason tournament in Pac-10 history.
With the exception of the Ivy League, every NCAA conference has or plans to have a men’s postseason conference tournament.
Such is not the case in women’s hoops.
“I was pretty much strong-armed into going along with it,” Runge told The Register-Guard. “The Atlantic Coast Conference is the only other league in the country that has a double round-robin schedule and then a league tournament. It backs up the start of league play (into December) and leaves us a very small window to help our RPI rating.
“Then we have almost two weeks off before we go into the [NCAA] tournament, and if you do well in the conference it’s very hard to beat another team three times.”
Runge advocated keeping the current double round-robin schedule, in which each team plays each other twice, when the planners were discussing the tournament in August.
“I think there are a lot of unanswered questions,” Runge told the Emerald in an August interview. “Conceptually, yeah, it’s easy to jump on the bandwagon and say ‘Let’s go for it.’ But the logistics still need to be worked out.”
The women’s tournament will feature all 10 Pac-10 teams, unlike the men’s tournament, which features the top eight. The women’s tournament will be played a week earlier than the men’s so both can be televised.