A few conferences making a go of it

Jan 07, 2021
As the calendar turns to January, more teams are taking the floor. And in the case of Whitworth, they are doing so with cardboard cutouts of fans in the seats.
Whitworth athletics photo
 

Thursday night brought the start of conference play in the ASC and a few more conferences edged toward doing the same by announcing their schedule for abbreviated seasons starting later this month. As of Thursday night, 29 men's teams have played games which count and 26 women's teams have done the same.

Any schedule should be viewed as preliminary at this point since schools frequently cancel games, postpone them or change opponents to deal with the ever-changing health and safety challenges related to COVD-19. At this point here is latest on conferences who are planning to move forward:

  • The CCIW released its men’s and women’s basketball schedule with a target start date of Jan. 23. Each team will play 12 games, mostly through six home-and-home matchups with conference opponents. All nine schools are participating in the regular season that concludes on February 23 and all nine will participate in the conference tournaments.
  • The HCAC will have a similar schedule on almost the same timeline. Men’s and women’s teams will play six pairs of home-and-home games from Jan. 15 through Feb. 20. Bluffton, Manchester and Transylvania played a handful of non-conference games in late 2020.
  • The Northwest Conference has a 12-game slate with Pacific Lutheran, Puget Sound, Whitworth and Whitman playing each other four times each. One team will host another for two games scheduled back-to-back and then the teams will play two more games back-to-back at the other school later later in the season. The Whitworth men took the court on Thursday night and dropped a heartbreaker to NAIA College of Idaho, 94-92 in double overtime. 

Last month, the Little East announced an abbreviated conference schedule beginning in January that included six schools: Castleton, Eastern Connecticut, Keene State, Plymouth State, Mass-Dartmouth and Rhode Island College. Eastern Connecticut has since announced that its women’s basketball team will not participate, though the men’s team intends to try at this point.

The American Rivers Conference (A-R-C) announced its winter schedule back in November. Each team will play the other eight once starting on January 23, leading up to a nine-team conference tournament. The UMAC will have a similar set up with each team playing the other nine once starting on January 30.

Entering the week, most of the ASC teams had already played at least one game and now nearly all of them have. Conference play tipped off on Thursday night with the Texas-Dallas women topping Mary Hardin-Baylor 62-58 in a rematch of last year’s NCAA Tournament matchup.The East Texas Baptist men held off McMurry 77-72 to improve to 6-3, 1-0 in the ASC.

Some conferences have canceled at least their own schedules and championships while allowing individual members to schedule games at their discretion. The MASCAC and SUNYAC went a step farther in announcing that none of their members will play at all this academic year.

Other conferences, like the SLIAC, have announced intentions of beginning play in February or have not committed either way.

We will do our best to navigate the schedule changes and track all the action as it happens on our scoreboard and team pages so please bear with us!