No Fans Allowed For Upcoming SoCon Basketball Tournament

(soconsports.com) SPARTANBURG, S.C. – In accordance with COVID-19 safety measures established by the state of North Carolina and Buncombe County regarding public gatherings, there will be no general ticket sales to the 2021 Ingles Southern Conference Basketball Championships presented by General Shale. The tournaments are slated for March 4-8 at Harrah’s Cherokee Center in Asheville, North Carolina.

“This should be an exciting and competitive tournament this year, but due to COVID-19 health and safety protocols, it will have a different look,” SoCon Commissioner Jim Schaus said. “We are working with a variety of city, county and facility staff to make this a great but safe tournament for all participants. It helps that they staged the Maui Invitational recently and understand how to run a safe and successful large-scale tournament. A lot of planning has also gone into having contingency plans as issues arise. Although we will not be allowed to have general public ticket sales for the event, we anticipate record television viewership.”

The league has also unveiled modified tiebreaking procedures for this season, made necessary by the several postponed games that will preclude every team from playing the same number of games and taking into account the possibility of the tournament not being able to be played.

For both men’s and women’s basketball, the regular-season champion will be the team with the best winning-percentage in conference play, with the men needing to play a minimum of 10 league contests and the women eight – standards all but Samford’s men and ETSU’s women have met so far, with both of them just one game shy of reaching the threshold. If the tournament is unable to be played and the league must determine its NCAA automatic qualifiers based off the regular season, preference will be given to the team playing the most conference games in the event of identical percentages.

If the tournaments are played to completion, the winners will earn the SoCon’s automatic bids to the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments.

In seeding the SoCon tournaments, seeding will be determined by conference winning percentage and will be done first among the teams that have met the minimum number of games played. Teams that do not meet the minimum threshold will be seeded after the top four are seeded in the women’s bracket and after the top six in the men’s bracket.

Additionally, some previously announced tournament game times have been altered slightly to allow additional time for COVID testing and sanitizing the court, bench areas and Tier 1 and Tier 2 seating between games.

The women’s games will now start at 12 p.m., 2:15 p.m., 4:30 p.m. and 6:45 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, March 4. Games will now start at noon and 2:30 p.m. on Friday, March 5, while the title game on Sunday, March 7, remains a noon tip.

The only changes on the men’s side were to the last two quarterfinal games on Saturday, March 6, which will start a half hour earlier than previously announced, at 5:30 and 8 p.m.

Many of the ancillary events surrounding the tournament have been canceled for this year, including the Ingles SoCon Fan Experience inside the arena, the Education Days program and the Downtown Dribble.