Fresno Pacific’s 2026 baseball schedule included a useful exercise in logistical efficiency. From March 27 through March 29, the Sunbirds played four games at Chaminade. On April 1 and 2, they played four more at Hawaii Pacific. Eight games in seven days, against two opponents on the same island. As ways to organize transpacific baseball travel go, the schedule made sense.
But efficiently organizing a trip is not the same thing as establishing that the trip is worth taking.
For Fresno Pacific and Menlo, that has resulted a conference-affiliation question. Both schools have moved from the Pacific West Conference to the California Collegiate Athletic Association for the 2026–27 academic year, bringing their baseball programs into the CCAA in spring 2027. Their announcements emphasize geography, travel demands, and institutional sustainability – considerations that sound almost quaint beside the media-rights calculations associated with major-conference Division 1 realignment.
This got me thinking.
Baseball is one of 10 Fresno Pacific sports moving into the CCAA. Whatever the advantages or disadvantages of a different baseball schedule, the university was evaluating a much larger package. When we see schools enter and leave Power 5 conferences, the motivations are easy to diagnose. But what would cause a D2 school to change a years-long affiliation?
If we take away the assumption that a conference’s most important function is delivering enormous television distributions, a more basic question emerges: What, exactly, is a conference worth?
A conference sells coordination
The easy answer is that Division I realignment follows money while Division II realignment follows geography. The better answer is that geography is money, and that different conferences face very different exchange rates.
Of course, there is media money here, too. In May 2024, the CCAA announced an exclusive, multiyear, seven-figure agreement with FloSports, with the revenue to be reinvested in member institutions. The conference is not operating outside the commercial sports economy. But it is obviously participating at a different scale from the Big Ten, whose seven-year agreement announced in 2022 was reported at more than $7 billion.
Those figures illuminate why the same additional travel expense might occupy very different places in their decision-making. A sufficiently large increase in media revenue can justify a substantial increase in operating costs. A smaller increase may not. There is nothing inherently irrational about either choosing a distant opponent or preferring a nearby one. The relevant question is what the institution receives in return.
Before a conference sells a single broadcast, however, it must solve a coordination problem.
A baseball program cannot produce its principal activity by itself. Its opponents are competitors in the standings but necessary partners in creating the games. A university can employ coaches, maintain a field, and recruit a roster, but without other institutions willing to arrive at an agreed time under agreed rules, it has purchased an unusually elaborate practice operation.
A conference helps turn those separate investments into a usable schedule. It reduces the work of repeatedly finding opponents and negotiating the terms of competition. Members accept obligations to one another because the resulting network provides something more valuable than a collection of individually convenient dates.
That is the bargain: some loss of flexibility in exchange for dependable competition.
But a dependable schedule can still be an expensive schedule. The value of the conference depends partly on how much it costs to fulfill those obligations, and on whether another conference offers a better combination of benefits and burdens.
For Fresno Pacific and Menlo, the CCAA offered a different answer to that calculation.
The cost is larger than the airfare
The Hawaii portion of Fresno Pacific’s schedule illustrates both the PacWest’s problem and an obvious way to manage it. Grouping two opponents into one stretch creates an economy of trip-building: more games can be attached to the substantial commitment of getting a team across the Pacific.
Menlo’s 2026 schedule used a similar arrangement, with eight games scheduled against Chaminade and Hawaii Pacific over five days. Seven were played; one was canceled. These were concentrated blocks of competition, not a succession of separate mainland-to-Hawaii trips.
The PacWest’s geography should not be confused with a failure to notice that airplanes are expensive.
The conference had already supplied plenty of California competition. Fresno Pacific hosted UH Hilo in 2026, rather than making a separate trip to the Big Island, and played mainland conference opponents including Menlo and Jessup. Three Hawaii members did not translate into three Hawaii trips for its baseball team that season.
The financial disclosures establish the scale of the spending affected by these scheduling choices, although they cannot isolate the savings.
In their 2025 Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act filings, Fresno Pacific reported approximately $1.74 million in game-day operating expenses, including $266,201 for baseball. Menlo reported approximately $1.33 million, including $198,899 for baseball.
These are neither total athletic-department budgets nor travel budgets. The reporting category includes transportation, lodging, and meals, but also equipment, uniforms, and officials. It would be incorrect to treat those figures as the amount available to be saved by changing conferences. They show the scale of contest-related operations, not the price of Hawaii.
Fresno Pacific does make a more specific claim about the expected benefit. Its transition FAQ forecasts significantly lower travel expenses and says that, in some sports, athletes could miss half as much class time under CCAA scheduling. The university does not provide the underlying calculation, and that forecast should not be converted into a verified result, or assumed to apply specifically to baseball.
Nevertheless, it identifies a cost that does not appear on an airline invoice.
Travel consumes student time, staff time, preparation time, and recovery time. A schedule can reduce the cost per game by keeping a team on the road longer while increasing other burdens. The cheapest itinerary for the business office is not automatically the least disruptive itinerary for the people taking it.
That is an opportunity-cost problem: time committed to one activity is unavailable for another. Its value does not disappear because the accounting system lacks a convenient line for it.
Nor does a financial benefit have to arrive as new revenue. Spending less to provide comparable competition can improve a department’s position just as surely as selling something new. The savings might support another athletic priority, reduce the subsidy required from the university, or simply provide protection against the next expense increase.
The department-wide perspective magnifies the issue. One baseball itinerary might be manageable. The relevant institutional question is what the conference’s geography requires across the entire collection of teams.
Institutional fit, but for what purpose?
Geography does not explain every dimension of affiliation. It does, however, help clarify what schools mean when they invoke the wonderfully elastic phrase “institutional fit.”
Fresno Pacific is a Christian university with Mennonite Brethren roots. The PacWest includes institutions such as Biola and Point Loma Nazarene, whose Christian identities are central to their own missions. On that dimension, FPU’s old conference provides some obvious peers.
Moving to a conference dominated by California public universities does not make those similarities disappear. It suggests that similarity of religious mission and usefulness as an athletic partner are different things.
FPU’s own FAQ anticipates the concern, affirming both its continuing Christian identity and its membership in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. Its athletic move does not require abandoning every other institutional relationship.
The economic interpretation is straightforward: a university does not need one network to perform every function.
It can collaborate with one set of institutions on religious or academic matters and another on organizing affordable competition. Requiring those groups to be identical may create a constraint without creating a corresponding benefit.
The CCAA is making a complementary choice.
The 12 institutions listed in its 2024 media-rights announcement were all California State University campuses. UC Merced began conference competition in 2025–26. Fresno Pacific and Menlo followed for 2026–27, with FPU becoming the league’s first private member since Grand Canyon’s departure in 2004. The conference is broadening its institutional composition while retaining its California footprint.
The CCAA was already geographically coherent. These additions do not rescue it from an incoherent map; they make the network denser and its membership more varied.
UC Merced’s explanation of its move into Division II is particularly revealing. In announcing NCAA acceptance, the university noted that nine Division II institutions were within 150 miles of campus, compared with only one NAIA institution. Moving into a different competitive classification could therefore bring it closer to a usable set of opponents, not farther away.
This is the potential advantage of economies of density. Another member can be especially useful when it sits near existing members and supplies teams in the sports they need. The benefit is not simply having a larger membership list. It is having more workable combinations of opponents, trips, and dates.
There are other possible benefits, too. Fresno Pacific explicitly places the move within its enrollment strategy. Menlo cites access to recruiting and alumni constituencies in California. These are broader institutional considerations than winning the next conference championship.
For a university evaluating athletics as part of student recruitment, the relevant return might include students who enroll or remain enrolled because of an athletic opportunity. That is not the same as saying every additional athlete is profitable: financial aid and the costs of educating and supporting that student belong in the calculation. But it explains why an athletic program’s institutional value cannot always be read from its ticket revenue.
None of this proves which benefit was decisive. It does suggest that “fit” should be interrogated rather than accepted as a complete explanation. Fit for recruiting? For controlling costs? For maintaining a religious identity? For competing in a particular sport?
Those questions can produce different lists of ideal partners.
There is also an important constraint on the whole exercise: a preferable conference must be willing to admit you. Menlo’s announcement described the CCAA opportunity as a “rare and time sensitive possibility.” The existence of nearby schools is not, by itself, an available conference invitation.
Someone still has to play Hawaii
The mainland perspective makes the appeal of regional realignment relatively easy to understand.
The Hawaii perspective makes it harder to treat that appeal as a complete solution.
Chaminade, Hawaii Pacific, and UH Hilo remain part of the PacWest’s competitive network. For them, mainland relationships are not merely an optional enhancement to an otherwise convenient schedule. They are central to the problem of assembling a conference around their location.
The strongest public evidence of that burden comes from UH Hilo.
In February 2025 legislative testimony, Hilo administrators said nearly 70 percent of their operating budget went toward travel-related costs, compared with approximately 20–25 percent for their continental peers. This was the university’s representation in support of a funding request, not an independently standardized comparison of athletic budgets. It nonetheless describes a dramatically different allocation of resources.
Later that year, the University of Hawaii reported that the state had made $500,000 in annual support for Hilo athletics permanent in its base budget, rather than requiring the funding to be requested each legislative session.
Here, the question in the headline becomes literal. Part of the cost of sustaining the institution’s athletic participation is being carried through recurring public support.
That does not establish whether the appropriation is too large, too small, or the optimal way to support athletics. It establishes that the cost of participation extends beyond a conference office choosing a clever schedule.
The underlying asymmetry is one of outside options.
A California school may have an opportunity to replace some transpacific competition with opponents elsewhere in California. A Hawaii school cannot obtain a nearby mainland by switching conferences. Even when both institutions value their relationship, their alternatives are not equally convenient.
That difference can create tension without either side behaving badly.
A mainland institution might reasonably conclude that another conference better serves its students and budget. Its Hawaii partners might reasonably regard reliable mainland membership as essential infrastructure. Both positions can be correct.
But there is an important complication: it does not follow that every mainland departure necessarily raises costs for the Hawaii schools that remain.
Hilo’s own testimony points in the opposite direction. It said recent PacWest expansion had increased the amount and duration of its travel, while additional conference championships created further expenses. More members had meant more obligations.
That is why conference economics cannot be reduced to “bigger is better.”
Adding a nearby opponent to an existing road trip might lower the average cost per game. Adding another required trip might increase the annual budget. A departure could eliminate an expensive obligation, remove a useful scheduling partner, or do some combination of both. The result depends on the schedule the remaining members construct.
A conference’s optimal size is not necessarily the largest number of schools willing to join. It is the membership and competition structure that supplies enough valuable games at an acceptable total cost.
The PacWest has long recognized the problem. An older strategic plan, with targets dating to the early 2010s, called for evaluating its geographic footprint, developing group purchasing arrangements for travel, and exploring scheduling pods. Those are not proof of its current arrangements, but they demonstrate that managing geography is a longstanding organizational task, not a newly discovered flaw.
The deeper issue is that the benefits of maintaining the network need not accrue to each member in proportion to its costs.
A school helps other members by being available to play them. Some of the value it creates therefore appears in theirschedules, not its own accounts. When it considers leaving, the institution has a strong reason to prioritize benefits to its students and budget rather than every benefit its membership provides to everyone else.
That is a network externality, not an indictment of the departing school.
It is also why an individually sensible move can leave a conference with a difficult collective problem. The institutions most able to choose a cheaper alternative may not be the ones most dependent on the existing arrangement.
None of the available evidence establishes that the PacWest’s Hawaii-mainland model is approaching collapse. It does explain why sustaining it requires more than observing that everyone would benefit from having a league.
Tennis makes the arrangement clearer
The most illuminating detail in these moves might belong to a sport other than baseball.
Fresno Pacific and Menlo are retaining PacWest affiliations for men’s and women’s tennis. Cal State LA and Stanislaus State also participate in PacWest women’s tennis. The CCAA does not sponsor tennis, so primary CCAA membership does not supply a complete conference home for those athletic departments.
This is not a contradiction. It is the logic of the moves in miniature.
The schools are not choosing between an organization that is universally useful and one that is universally defective. They are choosing among bundles of services and retaining a separate arrangement where the preferred bundle does not contain something they need.
In economic terms, they are unbundling.
Baseball can move with much of the department into a California-based conference. Tennis can remain in a network organized around a different collection of available programs. Other institutional relationships can continue independently.
This also limits the savings story. Joining the CCAA does not mean every team suddenly operates within one uniform travel footprint. The school-level result is the sum of several sport-level arrangements.
Conference affiliation looks tribal from the stands. From the business office, it can look considerably more modular.
The value of an ordinary game
There is a limit to what the public documents establish.
The transition announcements do not provide a complete before-and-after accounting of travel expenses, dues, entry costs, and media distributions. Without that comparison, it would be premature to assign a dollar value to either move or declare that the schools selected the financially optimal option
The CCAA’s own recent history also cautions against treating membership growth as a simple story of expanding opportunity. Sonoma State is scheduled to return to the conference in fall 2027 after a two-year athletics hiatus. Baseball is not among the sports in the announced return. A university’s return to conference competition and the restoration of its baseball program are not necessarily the same event.
That distinction should matter to baseball readers. Department-wide decisions create the conditions under which individual teams operate, but no sport is guaranteed to receive every benefit.
The useful lesson from Fresno Pacific and Menlo is therefore not that Division II has discovered a morally superior version of realignment. Nor is it that all-California conferences are inherently better than conferences that cross an ocean.
It is that a conference’s value includes something less conspicuous than its ability to sell a premium matchup: its ability to make an ordinary matchup workable.
At different revenue levels, universities can reach different conclusions about how much travel, expense, and disruption are worth accepting. The governing economic question remains the same: what does this relationship make possible, and what must each participant give up to sustain it?
For baseball, the most basic product is still two teams on the same field at the same time.
A conference does not have to deliver a television windfall to be valuable. Sometimes its most important contribution is making that ordinary game easier to keep playing.
