The St. Thomas men’s basketball team will head to St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, to take on Northwestern-St. Paul in the first round of the NCAA tournament on March 6.
After defeating Bethel 66-63 in the MIAC championship Sunday, the No. 6-ranked Tommies (24-3 overall, 17-3 MIAC) earned an automatic bid to compete in their 10th consecutive NCAA tournament. Northwestern-St. Paul (18-9 overall, 14-0 UMAC) also received an automatic NCAA berth defeating the University of Minnesota-Morris 68-39 in the Upper Midwest Athletic Conference championship.
Coach Tauer said he is excited to get another week of competition and to put in the hard work needed to play well in Green Bay.
“We feel great for our guys,” Tauer said. “It’s special as a college student-athlete to have a chance to participate in a national tournament, but obviously we know there’s a lot of work to be done. So you sort of temper the enthusiasm and combine that with the same hard work we’ve put in all year.”
The Eagles lost to four out of the five MIAC schools they played this season. Northwestern lost to Bethel 85-75, St. Olaf 85-60, Gustavus 77-67, Hamline 79-59 and defeated Macalester 68-56. The last time the two teams met was in the opening round of the 2010-2011 NCAA tournament when the Tommies defeated the Eagles 70-60.
Tauer said the team’s strategy against Northwestern will be to focus on controlling what they can and getting down to work.
“They’re consistently a dominant team in the UMAC. We played them in 2011 on our way to the national championship. They’re a very solid program,” Tauer said. “At this time of year, we always talk about controlling the controllables. Whoever they have us play against, I don’t know if we feel good or bad about it, we just say OK let’s get to work, and that’s what we do.”
“I think not so much on Northwestern, just getting ourselves prepared to play,” forward Conner Nord said. “It was a pretty grueling stretch there with back to back games, people had to play a lot of minutes so just getting physically healthy and just moving on.”
The Eagles average 70.3 points per game and are led offensively by junior guard Michael Carney, who averages 15.5 points per game. Their conference championship victory Saturday night was the team’s program-record 16th consecutive win and its fifth consecutive NCAA tournament appearance.
“They run great stuff on offense, they’re smart and they’re accustomed to winning,” Tauer said. “It will be a great test – kind of funny that we’re located 10 miles from one another and we’re going to drive several hundred to go play each other – but it should be a great first round test.”
St. Thomas could play either No. 3-ranked St. Norbert or unranked Elmhurst on March 7 at St. Norbert College in the second round of the tournament. St. Norbert earned the right to host the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament after going 24-1 overall this season and 18-0 in the Midwest Conference. The Green Knights have rattled off 15 straight wins after their only loss this season against unranked John Carroll University in December.
Elmhurst College finished third in the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin behind No. 8-ranked Augustana and unranked Illinois Wesleyan after going 19-7 overall and 9-5 in the CCIW this season.