Whitworth men heading to Atlanta for NCAA tournament

The No. 16 Whitworth men’s basketball team learned today that it will travel to Atlanta Wednesday to take on LaGrange College in the first round of the NCAA Division III tournament on Friday. The 24-3 Pirates won the Northwest Conference tournament on Saturday by beating Lewis & Clark 69-58 for Whitworth’s ninth consecutive-automatic bid into the bracket of 62 (two teams have first-round byes) for a chance to win a national championship. The team gathered today to watch the selection show and learned it will play in a pod of four teams at host Emory University in Atlanta. Coach Matt Logie said the team expected to end up in either Texas or Atlanta for its first-round game. If the Pirates beat LaGrange, they would face the winner of host No. 15 Emory (20-5) and Spalding University Golden Eagles (18-9) of Louisville, Ky. “It’s always neat to go to a new place and play some new teams,” Logie said. “This is the exciting part of the journey. We are going to lay our chips on the table and see how we stack up.” The LaGrange Panthers (17-11) get the benefit of geography. The Panthers will only have drive 67 miles up Interstate 85 to get to Atlanta. “I’ve not even heard of them before,” junior forward George Valle said, “but if they are in the NCAA tournament, they’ve got to be good. Every team from here on out is a new test.”

Women denied

The Whitworth women, hoping to get an at-large berth into the NCAA tournament, were bypassed by the selection committee. The Pirates (21-5) finished the season last Thursday with a 71-64 loss to Puget Sound in the first round of the Northwest Conference tournament. Whitworth coach Helen Higgs said she was disappointed her team wasn’t selected, but she knew the snub was a distinct possibility despite the team’s No. 23 ranking in last week’s D3hoops.com poll. She will gather her team later today to tell them. “That’s not a conversation you want to have,” she said. “I will tell the team that there are lessons you can learn from it. When you have things in your grasp, you have to control your own destiny.” However, Higgs said she’s proud of the Pirates’ best start ever (14-0) and the final record of 21-5, which is the second-best record Whitworth has had in her 21 years as coach. “If you look at the teams who got in, we played three … and we beat two of them (Puget Sound and Southwestern),” she said. “It’s not just the best teams that make the tournament.”