The Northwest Athletic Conference Basketball Championships have been rescheduled, and they will no longer be played at Everett Community College.
The men’s and women’s tournaments, which were originally set to take at Everett CC but were postponed last week because of concerns about coronavirus, will be played Thursday through Sunday at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, Oregon, and Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon. The men’s tournament will hold all four rounds at Clackamas. The women’s tournament will hold its first round and quarterfinals at Linn-Benton on Thursday and Friday, then hold its semifinals and championship at Clackamas on Saturday and Sunday.
The tournament’s original schedule had the first two rounds for both men and women taking place last Thursday through Sunday, then the semifinals and finals for both men and women being contested this Saturday and Sunday, all at Everett CC. However, just three women’s first-round games were completed last Thursday before the campus was closed. An Everett CC student later tested positive for COVID-19.
“First and foremost, I’m glad we can play,” Everett CC athletic director Garet Studer said Monday. “I’m glad they were able to find a location, making sure everyone — the spectators, the student athletes, the coaches — is safe and healthy. And then we didn’t want this to drag out for two weeks.
“The show goes on.”
Everett CC’s campus reopened Monday following a thorough cleaning. The student who tested positive was last on campus Feb. 27.
Both Everett CC’s men’s and women’s teams qualified for the tournament. The Everett women, the No. 4 seed from the North Region, face South No. 1 Umpqua at noon Thursday at Linn-Benton. The Everett men, the No. 1 seed from the North Region, play West No. 4 Gray’s Harbor at 6 p.m. Thursday at Clackamas.
NWAC executive director Marco Azurdia said the league was working to get all the games streamed online, as originally planned.
The NWAC was forced to scramble over the weekend to find alternate locations — Azurdia said he was part of 127 phone calls Friday night as the league reached out to a host of two- and four-year institutions — before securing Clackamas and Linn-Benton.
By playing four games in four days the tournaments will be completed Sunday as initially scheduled.
“We wanted to make sure we got this done sooner rather than later,” Azurdia said. “Had it extended we were looking at some schools being in their finals week, some schools being in the week before finals which is supposed to be a dead week, and then spring break. The reality was that there was the potential for it to go out four weeks, and that didn’t make sense.
“All the bells and whistles are not going to be there, we don’t have the luxury of that in a short turnaround,” Azurdia added. “But the bottom line was we wanted to get the games played as soon as we possibly could.”
The closing of Everett CC’s campus complicated the Trojans’ preparations. They didn’t have access to the gym and therefore were unable to practice. However, with the campus reopening the teams will get three practices in before heading to Oregon on Wednesday evening.
“We haven’t seen each other since Wednesday night,” Everett CC men’s coach Mike Trautman said prior to the team’s practice Monday afternoon. “But I think this time of year it’s always good to have a little rest. I know some of the guys got into gyms over the weekend and were able to get some shots up. We have three more days of practice, so we’ll be ready to play Gray’s Harbor, and we’ll have fresh legs now.”
The change of venue means Everett no longer has home-court advantage, but that didn’t concern Trautman.
“It’s fine with me,” he said. “We haven’t lost a road game this year. We lost four games, three were at home and one was on a neutral site. So we like being away. It’s a different mindset, it gets us out of our own houses and own beds and gets us focused.”
Studer said moving the tournaments had no financial effect on the school, beyond the teams’ extra travel costs, as NWAC takes home the gate receipts.
Everett CC remains the host for the 2021 tournaments.
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