Northridge Agrees to Align With Four Others in League

After 2 1/2 years at the Division I level, Cal State Northridge appears to have found a conference home.

The athletic directors of Northridge, Cal State Sacramento, Southern Utah State, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and UC Davis agreed to form a multisport conference Wednesday during a three-hour meeting at the NCAA Convention in Dallas.

The schools’ presidents will meet Jan. 28-29 in Sacramento to adopt the recommendation of the athletic directors.

The league, which does not yet have a name, would begin in the 1994-95 school year.

With a few exceptions, Northridge’s 17 athletic teams have played an independent schedule since the program moved to the Division I ranks in 1990. As a result, the majority of Matador teams have no conference title for which to play--nor do they receive the automatic NCAA tournament berths that generally accompany conference titles.

In June 1991, CSUN athletic director Bob Hiegert campaigned vigorously to have Northridge take Fresno State’s place in the Big West Conference, reasoning that eventually the Big West would drop from Division I-A football to Division I-AA. The cost of competing in Division I-A football is prohibitive for CSUN.

Last winter, Hiegert worked toward gaining membership in an expanded, two-division Big Sky Conference. Big Sky officials went so far as to tour the CSUN campus last January, but in the end, they turned down Northridge.

Hiegert did succeed in finding homes for baseball and softball, however. They are associate members of the Western Athletic Conference for the first time this spring. And men’s volleyball (Mountain Pacific Sports Federation) and swimming (Pacific Coast Swimming Conference) were able to find specific conferences.

But in the long term, Hiegert’s goal was to find a conference, within reasonable proximity, for Matador teams.

“The discussions went well,” Hiegert said. “I am pleased.”

In another meeting Wednesday, Hiegert worked on putting the final touches on the 1993 football schedule, the Matadors’ first at the I-AA level.

For more than a year, Hiegert has attempted to finish the schedule while establishing a I-AA football conference whose budget parameters matched CSUN’s. But after a seemingly endless series of meetings he was getting nowhere.

On Wednesday, however, former Division II Western Football Conference members, including CSUN, and members of the Division II Northern California Conference met and ironed out their differences.

“I think we’ll have the schedule sewed up by Friday or Saturday afternoon,” he said.