Pacific’s Winter Sports Wrap-Up
Photo by Mōhai Peloso
After a historic fall season complete with championships won, records broken, and legacies restored, the Pacific athletic programs will enter 2026 with renewed expectations and increased momentum. As the spring sports put finishing touches on their winter training blocks and fine-tune their regimens for the start of their seasons, let us take a look at the winter sports that are already well underway.
Women’s Basketball
After dominating the early-season tournament at Spanos Center in late November, winning their two games by a combined 46 points, spirits were high among the Tiger faithful. The women would go on to win four of their next six games, including a 116-point explosion on December 19th. They carried this momentum into their first two games of conference play, beating both Seattle University and the University of San Diego to open the regular season undefeated. Since then, however, the Tigers have suffered a five-game slide and now sit at 2-5 in conference play. They will need to regain the momentum they found in the early season in order to gain a favorable seeding in the West Coast Conference (WCC) postseason tournament and have another chance at glory in this year’s National Invitational Tournament.
Men’s Basketball
Coming off a disappointing 2024-25 campaign, the revamped men’s basketball team quickly dispelled any doubts about their quality, notching big wins against nonconference opponents early in the season. They entered conference play with a 9-4 record, a far cry from the 4-9 start from last season. So far, the men have split their first eight games of conference play, and despite their relative struggles on the road, remain undefeated in front of the home crowd at the Spanos Center. They currently sit at 5th place in the WCC and will need to string together a few more wins before the home stretch. The January 28th rematch with the University of Portland, who scraped by the Tigers by a point just twenty days prior, will be a critical point in the season, as Pacific looks to maintain their undefeated record at home. With free pizza going to the first hundred student attendees, there is no better game to pack the Spanos Center than this one.
Track
The first season of indoor track in the Coach Isaac Wood era began at altitude in Reno, Nevada, in late December. The men’s and women’s distance teams, coming off NCAA West Regionals in cross country just weeks prior, used the opportunity to squeeze quick times out of their remaining fitness, while the sprinters and jumpers tested their early-season legs. On the women’s side, standout sophomore Angelina Lione took four seconds off the 10-year-old school record, running a 10:02.68 to take the title by twenty seconds. That time would only stand until the next meet, however, where Lione would run a blistering 9:47.27 to firmly cement herself as one of the region’s best up-and-comers. Freshman Winisha Steele Michael would also rewrite the record book in her first 200-meter race of the season, ducking under the previous school record with her mark of 25.68. She followed that with another all-time best in the 60-meter dash, cruising to a time of 7.94.
On the men’s side, standout performances came at the University of Nevada (UNR) and the University of Washington (UW). Up north, sophomore Kohl Sanders notched a 3-kilometer time of 8:30.17, setting the school record yet again in his first 3K of the season. In Reno, standout sophomore Jonathan Jones broke the 56-year-old school record in the long jump, leaping a distance of 20 feet, 3.75 inches to surpass the standing mark by almost two feet. Pacific will return to both UW and UNR in the coming weeks to chase more meet wins and records as they prepare to compete for the conference title in March.