Seattle native Ruth Jessen attended for a year and was a top LPGA tour player in the 1960s. In 1953, Patricia Lesser won the women's individual intercollegiate golf championship (an event conducted by the Division of Girls' and Women's Sports (DGWS) — which later evolved into the current NCAA women's golf championship). In March 1980, due to a recession that crippled the region, the administration contemplated dropping intercollegiate athletics. Two months later, SU voluntarily downgraded its athletic program from NCAA Division I to the small college NAIA, the Chieftains competed at this level for the next 21 years. Under the leadership of university president Stephen Sundborg, SJ, Seattle changed its nickname from Chieftains to Redhawks in January 2000. Seattle rejoined the NCAA in 2001 and competed in Division III for a year, then in Division II from 2002 to 2009. For the 2009–10 academic year, Seattle's varsity teams played full schedules against Division I opponents. Although it was then a Division I independent, the university had initially hoped to rejoin the West Coast Conference (where they played before leaving the NCAA in 1980), since all nine current members were private, religiously affiliated institutions (seven are Catholic and four share Seattle University's Jesuit affiliation). Seattle also explored membership in the Big Sky Conference, although all of its members played FCS football. Seattle once again became eligible for Division I NCAA Championships beginning in 2012–13, and is a full Division I-AAA member (no football) in all 20 sports. During the 2010–14 NCAA conference realignment, the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) saw a large number of their members leave. From 2011 to 2013, twelve schools left the WAC. In June 2011, the WAC invited Seattle to join as a full member beginning July 2012. Seattle accepted soon after for all of the sports it sponsors at the varsity level except rowing, which the WAC does not sponsor and, initially, men's swimming and diving, which the WAC did not sponsor at the time. Men's swimming and diving was added as a WAC-sponsored sport in 2013. The conference dropped football after the 2012 season and in the summer of 2013, only three members from the prior year remained in the conference (Seattle, New Mexico State, and Idaho). The WAC added six new members in 2013, and when Idaho returned to the Big Sky in 2014 (& Sun Belt for football), Seattle became the second-longest tenured WAC school after just three seasons in the league.