After suffering a heartbreaking loss to Azusa Pacific in the final game of the Golden State Athletic Conference season on Monday night, Westmont Men’s Basketball begins play on Thursday in the first round of the GSAC Tournament.
In order to earn an automatic bid to the NAIA National Tournament in Kansas City, fifth-seeded Westmont will need to win the tournament championship, beginning with a match-up at twenty-three ranked and fourth-seeded Fresno Pacific. The Warriors and Sunbirds spilt their two regular season meetings with Fresno Pacific prevailing 67-61 in Fresno and Westmont winning 67-63 in Santa Barbara.
John Martony will travel with the Warriors to Fresno to provide a radio broadcast of the first round game on AM 1290 beginning at 7:15 p.m. The Thursday broadcast will also be available via the internet on News-Press Radio.
If victorious on Thursday, Westmont will advance to the semifinals on Saturday night which will be held at Chase Gymnasium on the Biola campus in La Mirada. The Warriors opponent would be the winner between top-seeded and top-ranked Concordia and eighth seeded Point Loma Nazarene. A victory in the semifinals would advance Westmont to the finals on Tuesday night that will also be held at Biola. Tickets for both Saturday’s semifinals and Tuesday’s finals are available online at http://athletics.biola.edu/tickets.
The Warriors are also on the bubble for an at-large invitation to the National Tournament, but the bubble is very thin. Though not ranked in the final poll released today, the Warriors did receive the thirtieth most votes.
At-large selection to the 32-team national tournament is accomplished strictly by the final poll of the season. There are 17 automatic bids and one host bid to the national tournament, leaving 14 at-large bids. The host bid and one automatic bid will go to teams not receiving votes in the national poll. The remaining automatic bids will go to winners of the various conference tournament championships and, in some cases, winners of the regular season championships.
If all of the remaining automatic bids go to teams receiving more votes than Westmont, the Warriors will be the final team to receive an at-large bid. However if one or more of the automatic bids goes to an unranked team, or one receiving less votes than the Warriors, Westmont’s ticket to Kansas City will not come as the result of an at-large bid. Conference tournaments around the nation start as early as Tuesday and conclude no later than one week from tonight.
