BILLINGS — For the first time in 21 years, not one, but two Montana State Billings basketball teams will be playing in the NCAA Division II Tournament.
Both the Yellowjackets' men's (20-9 overall) and women's (24-7) squads were selected to their separate 64-team fields announced by the NCAA on Sunday, with each making the D-II's version of "March Madness" after making their last appearances in 2012 and 2018, respectively.
MSUB will be sending both programs to the national tournament in the same year for the first time since 2002 after each team earned an at-large bid from the NCAA selection committee.
Both teams finished second in their separate Great Northwest Athletic Conference regular seasons and lost out in GNAC Tournament play this past weekend, but had each done enough throughout the year to prove themselves worthy of a ticket to the West Region Championships, which begin Friday.
"It's exciting for our school as well as our team," Jackets women's coach Kevin Woodin, who took MSUB to the Elite Eight in the school's last appearance in the tourney, said of his program's accomplishment. "I thought our new players stepped into roles and this year was just all about a team. ... It's nice to see them rewarded."
The Jacket women, seeded fourth in the eight-team West Region, will play No. 5 seed Cal State Los Angeles (20-9) in their opening game. As for the men, they earned the final at-large bid of the West Region as the No. 7 seed and will take on second-seeded Cal State San Bernardino (27-3) to open their postseason. Both games are set to be played Friday at yet-to-be-determined times.
The West Region — which consists of the top teams from the GNAC, PacWest Conference and California Collegiate Athletic Association — and its tournament is one of eight total that will be held across D-II from Friday to next Monday to determine each region's representatives to the Elite Eight as winners.
Top seeds, which are Point Loma (California) for the men and Cal State Dominguez Hills for the women, will act as host sites for the West Region Championships. The schools are located in San Diego and Carson, California, respectively.
The MSUB men, who had to sweat out their postseason fate after losing four of their past five games, got in for the first time in over a decade and for the first time in the tenure of newly-crowned GNAC Coach of the Year Mick Durham.
Durham, amid his fifth season in charge, formerly coached Montana State from 1990-2006 and now has a second Montanan college basketball team that he's coached in a NCAA Tournament after leading the Bobcats to an appearance in the D-I "Big Dance" in 1996.
"It's hard to do," Durham said of the Jackets' berth. "You've got to battle through your league ... but it's really hard to do when you have 30 West Region teams and trying to get in the top eight isn't easy. We obviously got off to a real good start and carried that through (the year) and we're looking forward to it."
The women's team's place in the tourney field was more assured throughout Sunday, even after reigning national runner-up Western Washington defeated the Jackets in Saturday's GNAC Tournament championship game in Bellingham, Washington.
Thanks to an epic 11-game in-conference winning streak to start 2023 that saw MSUB beat that same nationally-ranked Vikings squad twice — along with few major slip-ups for the most part — the Jackets hovered around the top half of the West Region rankings toward the end of the regular season and stayed there.
"I think we're all just really happy to get the opportunity to play, to go to the tournament," junior guard and Billings West alum Shayla Montague said. "No one on the team right now has ever been to the tournament, so we're just excited to get another opportunity to play another basketball game and just keep going forward."
Both the men's and women's West Region brackets saw three GNAC teams make each NCAA tourney field.
GNAC regular season champ Saint Martin's (No. 4 seed) and GNAC tournament winner Northwest Nazarene (No. 8), which earned the league's automatic bid despite entering the West Region tournament with a 15-14 record, both made it in on the men's bracket. They'll take on No. 5 Academy of Art (California) and Point Loma, respectively.
The two non-MSUB representatives from the GNAC in the women's bracket are No. 2 Western Washington and No. 6 Central Washington, which play seventh-seeded Azusa Pacific (California) and third-seeded Cal State San Marcos, respectively.