The History of Sports at MHCC

College athletics are a major way for students to hone their skills and compete against comparable talent while obtaining an education. Athletes come from all over the West Coast to play at Mt. Hood Community College. But it wasn’t always like this, especially when junior colleges were not organized into conferences or leagues like we see today.

MHCC’s athletics program really started in 1968-69, two years after the college was built. This was when Clackamas, Lane, Mt. Hood, and Umpqua community colleges joined the Oregon Community College Athletic Association (OCCAA). The OCCAA was originally formed by a group of five junior colleges in 1963 when Blue Mountain, Southwestern Oregon, Central Oregon, Clatsop, and Treasure Valley community college organized an intercollegiate athletic structure.

Before the OCCAA was created, Oregon’s neighboring state, Washington, formed the Washington State Junior College Athletic Conference (WSJCAC), in 1946. This conference was the first structured league and held the first championship tournaments in Washington junior college history. It consisted of nine junior colleges from Washington. A tenth member, Columbia Basin Community College, was added in 1955.

The separation of the two leagues in Oregon and Washington created little opportunity for OCCAA community colleges to play with the WSJCAC (later renamed the Washington Athletic Association of Community Colleges (WAACC). Wanting to be able to compete with its neighboring state’s colleges, Mt. Hood left the OCCAA and joined the WAACC in 1970. The league soon renamed itself the Northwest Athletic Association of Community Colleges (NWAACC).

As community college athletic programs were starting to grow, others were eager to follow MHCC’s lead. Seven of the OCCAA collegiate members would also join the NWAACC, which ended up with the two leagues merging in the 1983-84 season. This merger allowed Washington and Oregon community colleges to freely compete against one another.

Nearly a dozen additional colleges have been added to the NWACC. Today, Mt. Hood Saints athletes compete in the Northwest Athletic Conference (NWAC), whose name was shortened in 2014 from the previous version. The league has spread even wider to include North Idaho (in Couer d’Alene) and Douglas (Vancouver, B.C.) in several sports. Now that we know how Saints sports came to be, how have the different sports teams at Mt. Hood succeeded in their decades of athletic participation?

Andrew Hull

Editor-in-Chief