(Portions of this story courtesy of NCAAsports.com and the Trinity University athletics department)
SAN ANTONIO, Texas – The 2016 Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference women's basketball champion, Trinity University, will make its first appearance in the NCAA Division III Women's Basketball Championship Tournament since 2013 as they take on Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Colleges in Tyler, Texas. Interactive Bracket
Trinity (22-5) meets Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (CA) Colleges (22-5) at 5:00 p.m. in the first round at the University of Texas-Tyler. Host UT-Tyler (27-1) takes on the University of California-Santa Cruz (15-11) in the other opening-round game, scheduled for a 7:30 p.m. tip. The winners advance to the second round, which is set for Saturday at 5:00 p.m.
The Tigers earned their second automatic tournament bid in four seasons by capturing the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference Championship last Sunday at Shreveport, Louisiana. Top-seeded Trinity defeated No. 3 Schreiner University 66-50 to claim the title at the Gold Dome. The Tigers, led by fourth-year Head Coach Cameron Hill, last appeared in the NCAA postseason event in 2013, after Trinity captured the SCAC title in his first season at the helm.
Overall, Trinity's women's team has now qualified for the NCAA Tournament eight times since 1995. The Tigers captured the NCAA Championship in 2003.
Forty-four conferences have been awarded automatic qualification for the 2016 championship. The final 20 berths were reserved for Pool C, which includes institutions from automatic-qualifying conferences that are not the conference champion, and any Pool B teams. Based on sponsorship numbers for 2015-16, there were no Pool B berths for this year's championship.
Sixteen first/second-round sites will be conducted March 4-5. Second-round winners will advance to one of four sectional sites March 11-12. Winners of the four sectional sites will advance to the national semifinals March 19. All games, except the semifinals and final, will be played on the campuses of competing institutions. The semifinals will be conducted at the Capital Center Performance Arena on the campus of Capital University in Columbus, Ohio.
The finals will be part of a larger 35th anniversary NCAA women's basketball championship celebration taking place at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis the first week in April. Championship week will culminate with five championship basketball games and three national titles decided within a 48-hour period at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. It will be the first time in the history of NCAA women's basketball that all three divisional championships will be decided in the same city and venue. The Division I national semifinals will be played Sunday, April 3 at 6 and 8:30 p.m. EST. The Division II and III national championship games will be played on Monday, April 4 at 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., respectively, while the Division I national championship game will be played on Tuesday, April 5 at 8:30 p.m. Tickets for all games are now on sale at NCAA.com/WBBTickets.
