As I am sure you have heard, the Pac-12 as we know it is no more. Whether you are for or against this change, you cannot deny the huge impact this will have on all collegiate sports. As someone who has lived in Los Angeles for most of her life, I am extremely sad to see the Pac-12 go. The Pac-12 has shaped my sense of what collegiate sports are like, and while I will miss having a powerhouse conference in my backyard, I will enjoy watching home games at UCLA and USC, where they will compete against some of the best teams in the country from the Big 10.
Since Saturday’s Pac-12 baseball conference championship marked the end of Pac-12 events, I thought it was fitting to start my series on the geography of college recruiting here! Let’s take a look at where the student athletes competing in the Pac-12 have come from. In my next post, I’ll take a look at how the old Pac-12 teams fit into their new conferences, so stay tuned!
So, where do the student athletes who have competed in the Pac-12 over the last 11 years come from? Most collegiate teams have strong regional ties for recruiting, but it seems as though top volleyball schools are more likely to pull from outside of their region, which makes sense since they are recruiting the best athletes in the country. The Pac-12 is undoubtedly one of the best conferences in volleyball (even if they haven’t brought home a natty in a few years), so it would make sense that their recruiting would be more national rather than regional. But what happens when your region just happens to have some of the best volleyball in the country? While we do see Pac-12 teams pulling from other volleyball hotspots, especially those in the Midwest and Texas, the Pac-12 has a plethora of talent within their own regions that they certainly get the pick of.
The map below shows where the Pac-12 colleges get their recruits from.
While the Pac-12 draws athletes from across the country, there are definite tendencies that can be seen even more clearly when looking at the maps for specific schools.
Volleyball players at the University of Washington and Washington State have come–with a few prominent exceptions–predominantly from the West Coast, with UW and particularly WSU recruiting more from the Northwest than almost any other Power 5 conference school, and UW also drawing heavily on athletes from Southern California.
Recruiting for both Oregon and Oregon State has drawn a bit more broadly than the Washington schools, with the Beavers pulling more athletes from Texas, and the Ducks historically having strong pipelines in Arizona and Southern California.
Arizona and Arizona State, not surprisingly, have stronger ties to the Southwest, with very few recruits coming from the Northwest. Historically, Arizona State has drawn a bit more from Texas, and Arizona more from California.
As one might expect, the four California Pac-12 schools have recruited heavily in California, with Cal drawing the greatest proportion of its student athletes from California, and Stanford looking at out-of-state athletes the most (particularly from Texas and the Midwest). While Cal may have a higher percentage of in-state students, UCLA and USC have more students that are going to college within a few hours of home. In fact, the median distance from the university to a student-athlete’s home is only 300 miles (less than the distance from LA to San Francisco) for both UCLA and USC. That’s less than half the median distance between the university and student-athlete’s homes for the Oregon and Washington schools, which have the greatest median distance between university and students’ homes in the Pac-12.
Utah and Colorado have had somewhat distinct geographic patterns from the other Pac-12 schools over the past decade. Utah is unusual in the extent to which it draws in student athletes from non-coastal Western states (not just Utah, but also Idaho and Nevada), whereas Colorado stands out for having consistently recruited players fairly evenly from across all of the junior volleyball hotspots.
It will be interesting to see if conference realignment changes the geography of recruiting for these schools. I started attending Pac-12 games at a young age, and that’s how I was first exposed to some colleges. In fact, other than the local schools, they were really the only colleges I knew about until I got older. Changing conferences not only changes the schools that potential student athletes are exposed to, but may influence the networks that college coaches build as well.