June 16, 2010
BELLINGHAM, Wash. -
By DAVID RASBACH, THE BELLINGHAM HERALD
The Western Washington University men's and women's basketball teams will have a new postseason hurdle to clear next spring.
The Great Northwest Athletic Conference Management Council has approved inaugural postseason conference championship tournaments in men's and women's basketball and men's and women's soccer, GNAC Commissioner Richard Hannan announced in a press release on Tuesday, June 15.
The first basketball tournaments will be held this coming season (2010-11), but the first soccer events will not be held until the fall of 2011 due to conflicts with previously scheduled contests.
"We're really excited about adding postseason tournaments in basketball this coming season and in soccer in 2011," Hannan said in the release. "We're still a fairly young conference, and we see this as another step in the continual growth and development of our conference. This is something the athletic directors and our Management Council have examined for years. ... The Management Council felt it was time to explore this format and the opportunities it presents."
Before the change, the GNAC was just one of two NCAA Division II conferences - along with the PacWest Conference - that did not hold postseason basketball tournaments to determine its automatic qualifiers to the NCAA Tournament.
"I think we're a little ambivalent about the change," WWU athletic director Lynda Goodrich said in a phone interview. "I don't think the women's basketball coaches wanted it, but I think the men's did. For the good of the conference, we felt it was something that we needed to support."
Eight men's teams and eight women's teams will compete in the opening round of the basketball tournaments on Feb. 26 with the top four regular-season finishers hosting games. The two highest surviving seeds will host semifinal games on March 1, and the top remaining men's and women's seeds will then host the championship games on March 5.
Goodrich said the new GNAC tournament could help the conference get more teams to the regional round of the NCAA Tournament, as it will give more teams an opportunity to claim the conference's automatic bid to the tournament. Under the new format, the GNAC tournament champion will receive the automatic berth, rather than the regular-season champion, as in seasons past.
The regional polls still will be used to fill out the regional bracket and determine where the regional games will be played.
Obviously, losses in the conference tournament also can affect team rankings late in the season. Last year, Cal Poly Pomona suffered a loss in the California Collegiate Athletic Association tournament, allowing WWU to grab the top spot in the final regional poll and host the regional tournament.
"There's good rationale for doing it and good rationale for not doing it," Goodrich said. "In the end, we felt it was best to do it ... I think overall, it will give our conference a little more exposure and generate some pretty good excitement, because everybody will have a chance to advance at the end of the season."
Goodrich said to accommodate the change, GNAC regular-season games will need to start earlier in December, though the conference tournament will not count against the number of regular-season games each program is allowed to schedule.
The soccer tournaments will include four men's and four women's teams and will be held at a site to be determined. The women's tournament will determine the GNAC's automatic berth in the playoffs. Currently no automatic berth to the NCAA playoffs is granted to the GNAC in men's soccer.
"We couldn't make the soccer tournaments work this year, but I think the (GNAC) tournament could be really valuable for them to try to get more teams into regional competition," Goodrich said. "That's the real value of the conference tournaments. ... It will be fun, and it will be different and exciting."
