Christian McGeachy
Sports Editor
As many sport fans know, March Madness is a big time of the year for many NCAA men’s basketball teams around the country. It has to come to my attention that the NJCAA does the same thing, but in a different fashion.
Like the NCAA, the NJCAA has tournaments before the big national championship tournament. But, instead of having conferences like the NCAA, NJCAA splits schools into regions.
Also, NJCAA splits community colleges up into three divisions based on the size of the schools. Division I having a lot of students, and Division III having a low population of students.
There are, in the whole United States, twenty four different regions that community colleges can be sorted into.
St. Clair County Community College is smack dab in the middle in Region 12. Region 12 consists of 28 different community colleges in the areas of the lower peninsula of Michigan, Indiana and Ohio.
As I learned about the NJCAA, I got to thinking why they didn’t give the regions names like they do in the NCAA. The NCAA has so many different conference names from the Big Ten, Sun Belt, WAC, PAC 12, ACC and SEC.
Maybe in the future they could bring that into consideration, but for now they will stay one through twenty four.
So, each region has their own tournament just like every conference in the NCAA has their own as well. Within those regions, they have districts. The winners of the district tournament goes on to the national tournament to be the NJCAA Division I, II and III champions.
The district tournament in Region 12B startes on March 6 and goes through to the 10 at Mott Community College.
After it’s all said in done, some will win and some will lose, but only one can be called National Champion.