After dominating Big East men’s basketball for the past two years, Georgetown will now have some control over the next commissioner of the 16-team league.

University President John J. DeGioia has been named a co-chair of a search committee to appoint a new Big East Commissioner to succeed Michael Tranghese, the commissioner for the past 18 years.

DeGioia will lead the six-person search committee alongside Mark Nordenberg, chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh.

Tranghese announced over the summer that he will step down in 2009. Tranghese joined the Big East in 1979 when the league was founded as a seven-team league. Georgetown was a charter member of the conference, which was originally a basketball power.

According to DeGioia, Tranghese’s leadership, particularly during the expansion of the league to a 16-team super-conference several years ago, has primed the league for success and prosperity in the future.

“We believe that, with the new structure of the conference and the success we’ve had in these first few years of new membership, that we’re poised for the greatest period in the history of the Big East,” he said.

DeGioia said the conference has become about more than athletics and that member institutions share an academic identity as well.

“Academics are at the heart of who we are. We have some extraordinary institutions in the Big East, all of whom bring their unique academic strengths to our work,” he said. “We connect with many of these institutions in very specific ways, and it’s been a wonderful place for us to be engaged in intercollegiate athletics but also to deepen our ties between and among these institutions.”

Georgetown continues to be a basketball power of one of the best hoops conferences in the nation, while Nordenberg’s Pittsburgh Panthers play football in the up-and-coming football league.

“We’ve evolved with our programs through many transitions over the last three decades, but we believe the framework put in place over the past few years and the success of the conference, both in football and basketball, position us for a wonderful future,” he said.

Georgetown has won seven regular season Big East championships, including the last two, and seven tournament titles in men’s basketball. Women’s basketball has won one of each since the league began.

In addition to basketball, Georgetown participates in all sports that the Big East has a league for except football, which is in the Patriot League, and men’s lacrosse, which plays in the ECAC.

In 2010, however, the Big East will form a men’s lacrosse league, and Georgetown will be one of seven inaugural members. While the competition will be tougher than the Hoyas are used to in their current league, it will help their strength of schedule, which likely prevented them from earning an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament last spring.

Georgetown will play traditional basketball rivals in lacrosse, including Syracuse, Notre Dame and St. John’s.