6 CCC Hoop Teams Take NAIA Top 25 Rankings into Postseason Action
NAIA Division II Men’s Poll
NAIA Division II Women’s Poll
KANSAS CITY – Six Cascade Collegiate Conference basketball programs – three men’s, three women’s – will head into postseason play with NAIA Top 25 rankings on their resumes.
CCC tournament action begins Tuesday for the women and Wednesday for the men. The winners of the league’s postseason tourneys (provided it isn’t Concordia for the women or Oregon Tech for the men, which have already secured automatic bids to the NAIA Championships) will capture the league’s second automatic bids to the national tournament. In the event Concordia or Oregon Tech also win their respective league tournaments, the second automatic bid will be awarded to the tournament runner-up.
Both the men’s and women’s national championships are 32-team affairs which will be contested March 11-17. The men’s tourney is in Branson, Mo.; the women’s tourney is in Sioux City, Iowa.
In the latest NAIA Division II men’s Top 25, CCC co-champions Oregon Tech and Eastern Oregon are listed Nos. 9-10, respectively, in the poll announced by the national office Monday. Warner Pacific, the league’s third-place finisher in the final regular season standings, is ranked in a tie for 14th. Evergreen, the No. 4 seed in the CCC Tournament, just missed cracking the Top 25, earning 55 poll points for a No. 26 ranking.
For Oregon Tech, the No. 9 ranking marks the 15th consecutive poll it has earned a Top 10 ranking, and it marks the 50th straight poll in which it has been ranked among the nation’s Top 25, matching Walsh (Ohio) for the longest active streak in the Top 25.
In this week’s NAIA Division II women’s Top 25, CCC co-champions Concordia and College of Idaho are listed No. 11 and No. 14, respectively. Southern Oregon University, which finished in third place in the CCC, is ranked 22nd.