Central Arkansas to play in CBI
CONWAY — The Central Arkansas Bears will make their fourth trip to the West Coast this season for a Wednesday night postseason date with the Seattle Redhawks in the first round of the 2018 College Basketball Invitational tournament.
The matchup will be played at 9 p.m. at the Connolly Complex in Seattle.
The Bears (17-16) and Redhawks (20-13) are part of the 16-team field for the 11th annual CBI, which will be played on campus sites. The quarterfinals will be played Monday with the semifinals on March 21.
The teams will be re-bracketed prior to the semifinals. The finals will be a best-of-three series in which one team will host two of the three games on March 26, 28 and 30.
The Bears lost in the quarterfinals of the Southland Conference Tournament to eventual champion Stephen F. Austin (28-6) on Thursday in Katy, Texas. The 17 victories is the most for the Bears since moving to NCAA Division I in 2006-07.
Central Arkansas also won its first SLC Tournament game last week, knocking off No.
6 seed Lamar (19-13), 67-57, in the first round at the Merrell Center. The Bears have already played four teams from the west this season on three separate trips, beating California (8-24) and losing to Oregon (22-12), San Francisco (1815) and then-No. 20 UCLA (21-11) in overtime. Seattle finished fourth in the eight-team Western Athletic Conference. The Redhawks lost to eventual champion New Mexico State
(28-5) in the semifinals of the WAC Tournament on Friday.
The Redhawks were 16-2 at home this season. Seattle is coached by first-year head coach Jim Hayford and had three players earn postseason honors from the conference, including Aaron Menzies and Matej Kavas as All-WAC second-team selections, Menzies on
the All-Defensive team and Jordan Hill on the All-Newcomer team.
The other CBI first-round matchups include fellow Southland program New Orleans (15-16) hosting UT-Rio Grande Valley (1517), Eastern Washington (20-14) at Utah Valley (22-10)s, Colgate
(19-13) at San Francisco, Miami (Ohio) (16-17) at Campbell (16-15), North Texas (15-17) at South Dakota (26-8), Mercer (18-14) at Grand Canyon (22-11) and Jacksonville State (21-12) at Canisius (21-11).
Past CBI champions include Tulsa, Oregon State, VCU, Oregon, Pittsburgh, Santa Clara, Siena, Loyola Chicago, Nevada, and Wyoming. Twenty-eight CBI participants made the NCAA Tournament the following year, while another 18 went on to the NIT.
Senior guard Jordan Howard, from Chandler, Ariz., was named to the College Sports Information Directors of America Academic All-America team for the second straight year on Monday. He was a second-team selection after earning his degree in digital filmmaking in December with a 3.71 grade point average. He was a third-team Academic All-American last season, the first for Central Arkansas in its NCAA Division I era.
Howard is the third-leading scorer in the nation this season at 25.3 points per game and is in the top five in 3-pointers with a school-record 109. He also is the career scoring leader at Central Arkansas and in the state of Arkansas among Division I schools with 2,479 career points. Howard is the career leader for the program, the state of Arkansas and the Southland Conference in 3-pointers with 382.
Howard was named the Southland Conference Player of the Year and a first-team All-SLC selection last week.