Early Start Perplexes Coaches : Basketball: Postseason tournament, exams prompt opening of Pac-10 Conference season in November.

It’s not just the holiday season that seems to start earlier every year. So does the Pacific 10 Conference basketball season.

It’s still November and UCLA will play Washington tonight in Hec Edmundson Pavilion while USC opens at Washington State in Pullman.

Why so early?

When the Pac-10 voted to add a postseason tournament, it lost a week for conference games. For the last three seasons, leftover games were played in the week before Christmas. But those dates, in some cases, conflicted with final exams.

So, in the spring of 1987, conference athletic directors voted to play the games, starting this year, in the first weekend in December.

Two other conference games are scheduled for tonight.

Only California and Stanford, which were scheduled to meet Saturday but decided to move the game to the last week of the season, will not open conference play this week.

“It’s really a difficult time to start the conference season, particularly for a new coach with a new team,” said Washington Coach Lynn Nance, who was hired by the Huskies last April after leading St. Mary’s to a 25-5 season and the championship of the West Coast Athletic Conference.

Nance is one of three first-year Pac-10 coaches to make conference debuts almost before they have had time to meet their players.

Two other newcomers--Bill Frieder of Arizona State and Jim Anderson of Oregon State--will oppose each other tonight at Corvallis, Ore.

For ASU, the conference opener is also its season opener.

“I don’t think any of us coaches like to play league games this early,” UCLA Coach Jim Harrick said. “But you do what you have to do.”

Next season, Pac-10 games are scheduled for Nov. 29.

One obvious solution to the problem, of course, would be to discontinue the postseason tournament. That possibility, supported by the coaches, will be discussed at league meetings Dec. 7-10 in San Francisco.

This season’s conference tournament will be played March 8-11 at Tempe, Ariz., but the Pac-10 has not yet committed to a tournament site for 1991, conference spokesman Mike Matthews said.