WSC Putting Hancock Back on Its Road Map : Junior colleges: Santa Maria school will rejoin conference in the fall.

The Western State Conference apparently will regain one of its athletic members when Hancock College of Santa Maria joins the conference starting with the 1994-95 school year.

Walt Rilliet, commissioner of athletics for the Community College League of California, said the Commission on Athletics will hear a recommendation next Friday from its conference committee that Hancock be readmitted into the WSC, effective in July.

“It’s hard to tell what the commission will decide (officially), but Hancock probably will be placed in the Western State Conference,” Rilliet said.

Aviva Kamin, the WSC commissioner, said the recommendation will amount to nothing more than a formality.

“At this point, it’s a pretty acceptable fact they (Hancock) will be placed in our conference,” Kamin said.

Allowing Hancock into the WSC, however, was not what the conference schools wanted because of travel expenses, Kamin said.

“We voted in a meeting in November, when they (Hancock) applied to join, not to put them in the conference,” Kamin said.

Rilliet noted, however, that WSC schools travel north of Santa Maria to play conference games at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo.

The move was requested by Hancock officials because the Coast Valley Conference, in which the Bulldogs have competed since 1988 in several sports except football and soccer, will be disbanded after the current school year. Hancock, a WSC member from 1972 to 1988, played football in the Coast Conference and soccer in the WSC.

Rilliet said a new conference called the Central California Conference will be formed with nine schools that are members of other conferences. The geographic stretch of the CCC will run from Columbia College--about 50 miles east of Stockton--in the north to Taft College at its southernmost edge.

But John Osborne, Hancock’s athletic director, said those traveling distances were economically prohibitive.

“It would be too expensive for us because we would have to stay overnight if we played in some of those places,” Osborne said. “Merced is about 4 1/2 hours away and Modesto is about 5 1/2 probably.

“Where we are located, there are only three leagues that would be viable. One is the new league, the other is the Coast Conference, which would have been worse as far as cost, and the other choice was the WSC.”

All 11 schools in the Coast Conference are in the San Francisco and San Jose areas.