Faulkner draws No. 3 Biola in first round of NAIA tournament
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (faulknerathletics.com)– Faulkner will face Biola (Calif.), the regular season and tournament champion of the Golden State Athletic Conference, in the first round of the Buffalo Funds NAIA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament. The Eagles and third-ranked Biola – also nicknamed the Eagles – tipoff on Wednesday afternoon at 1:15 in Kansas City’s historic Municipal Auditorium.
The winner of the Faulkner (20-13) and Biola (29-3) game will face the winner Mid-America Christian (Okla.)-Park (Mo.) game Friday morning at 10:45. Faulkner head coach Scott Sanderson is familiar with the Biola program and head coach Dave Holmquist. While Sanderson was the head coach at Mobile, his Rams beat Biola in the Elite Eight on the way to the 1999 national championship game. The next season – Sanderson’s first at Lipscomb and the Bison’s last in the NAIA – his team lost to Biola in the Elite Eight.
This is Holmquist’s 36th season at Biola, and his 920 career victories is the seventh most in college basketball history, just behind another former Lipscomb coach, Don Meyer.
“They obviously have a great program with a lot of tradition,” Sanderson said. “They play the game the way it’s supposed to be played – hard and with a lot of energy. Statistically they’re one of the top defensive teams in the country, and having already watched a little of them I know it will be an extremely tough test for our basketball team. There’s no doubt that Biola is one of the top teams in the country.”
Faulkner earned its 10th trip to the national tournament and first since 2013 by winning last week’s Southern States Athletic Conference tournament. The Eagles won the national championship in 2001 and made the Fab Four in 2007. This will be Biola’s 20th trip to the national tournament under Holmquist, and his Eagles have five Elite Eight appearances, two Fab Four appearances and one appearance in the national championship game, which came in 1982.
