Antelope Valley in NAIA match regardless of faculty’s shutdown

Simply hours earlier than his faculty was set to close down for good, Antelope Valley males’s basketball coach Jordan Mast mentioned he was comfortable the boys’s and girls’s basketball groups will get the chance to complete the yr after elevating $40,000 to pay for his or her postseasons.

They won’t, nevertheless, have a campus to name dwelling after they return.

Regardless of its faculty not working after a authorities order to “stop operation of all diploma packages” by a Friday deadline due to monetary mismanagement, Antelope Valley’s males’s staff is a 6-seed that can face 11-seed Huntington (Indiana) within the first spherical in Glendale, Arizona, on March 15, following Thursday’s NAIA match bracket reveal. The ladies’s staff, which certified for the NAIA match after it received the California Pacific Convention regular-season title, is a 13-seed that can face 4-seed Southern Oregon in Ashland, Oregon, on March 15.

“Not like most groups this yr who is likely to be comfortable or upset with their seeding or matchup, we’re feeling past blessed that we even get to compete,” Mast informed ESPN. “The gamers have been by means of lots as our faculty has formally introduced it’s closing [Friday]. They’ve nonetheless not communicated to any of us or the scholars what their plans are for serving to college students discover a new faculty, or housing or end their diploma. The burden has fallen on the scholars, their households, our workers, and others locally that care concerning the well-being of those younger women and men.”

Final month, officers at Antelope Valley, a non-public faculty in Lancaster, California, informed Mast and the opposite coaches on the faculty that the groups’ seasons can be canceled due to the pending closure of the campus as a result of monetary difficulties they usually would not be allowed to take part within the NAIA match. Mast knew bother was forward when he and different staffers acquired simply 25% of their regular paychecks final month.

However the faculty agreed to permit Mast to boost the cash to complete the yr for the boys’s and girls’s groups however suggested him that athletes can be faraway from their dorms and barred from on-campus athletic services, giving some members of the groups simply days to scramble and try to search out housing and a brand new place to observe.

As Antelope Valley’s predicament went viral final month, Mast’s GoFundMe hit its aim of $40,000 inside 72 hours, extending the basketball season for the boys’s and girls’s groups.

Mast mentioned the basketball groups made a deal to proceed working towards of their fitness center however he’s nonetheless not sure of the following steps after the college’s official shutdown on Friday. The seasons of different groups on campus had been canceled midseason due to the college’s state of affairs. The Antelope Valley baseball staff’s season ended this week after a 9-6 begin.

Basketball, nevertheless, has given the gamers peace amid the chaos, Mast mentioned.

“Basketball has been a supply of normalcy for our groups,” he mentioned. “The court docket has been a spot for them to overlook the issues and points they’re going through. It has been a spot the place their stress and nervousness has been forgotten even when just for a short second. So for different groups, the match is likely to be a vivid spot or a reward for an incredible season, however for us, it means we get to go on a short while longer. We get to do one thing we love with the folks we love for just a few extra days or perhaps weeks, and we get to be collectively till we lose or win all of it and the fact of our state of affairs actually units in.”