When some of the best basketball players on a campus of over 35,000 students get together in any organized game with bragging rights on the line, fierce competition is always sure to ensue. One player in this year’s intramural field who knows top-end talent when he sees it is 6′ 6” Kaycee Obi-Gwacham, a junior in human biology and former member of the Wolfpack varsity basketball team.
“It is of course not like Div. I basketball, but the kids are still pretty good,” Obi-Gwacham said. “Some kids actually could have gone places and played basketball but just did not and are playing intramurals here.”
Obi-Gwacham said many of the competitors he plays against in intramurals quickly recognize what they are up against.
“Most of the time they do know that I used to play for State, so I guess they feel intimidated before the game starts,” Obi-Gwacham said. “Sometimes guys will walk up to me before the games and say, ‘Man, you should not be playing, this is not fair.’ But usually they are just kidding around when they say that.”
Nash Seawell, a junior in business management plays on the club basketball team and in three intramural leagues: co-rec, fraternity and elite. He said he is not the only member of the club team involved in intramurals.
“Everyone that is on the club team is on some sort of intramural team, whether it is elite or men’s open,” Seawell said.
And the level of competition only increases during the single-elimination playoff tournaments at the end of each season, according to Seawell, one of Obi-Gwacham’s teammates on the elite-league team Soloman’s Soldeirs.
“We definitely get after it a lot more in playoffs, because you win or you go home,” Seawell said. “Some of the guys are seniors and have been trying to win the championship for four years, so it gets pretty intense sometimes.”
But this year, thanks to Campus Recreation’s decision to make the playoffs harder to qualify for, they will likely be even more competitive than usual.
“They changed the playoff structure this year,” said Geoff Mclawhorn, a senior in accounting. “Only teams with three wins or more during the regular season are in the playoffs. You will not have as many blowouts because you will not have all the real bad teams in the playoffs. During the regular season you normally have a couple teams in your bracket where it is 30 or 40 or 50-point games, but when you get in a lot closer games, it will obviously be a lot more intense. All the games will be good to watch.”
The effect of the playoffs will do more than merely shrink the field and make blowouts less likely. The smaller playoff field will also be good because it will make the playoffs shorter and require teams to win fewer games, according to Seawell.
“I like how they are cutting down the playoffs,” Seawell said. “You do not have to win twenty games to get to the championship this year. They used to take every single team from the bracket, no matter what, no matter how bad your record was.”
While he said he expects postseason play to be more intense than regular season action, Mclawhorn, who plays for the men’s open team Unacceptable, said he still sees a few heavy favorites among the smaller field of playoff teams.
“There are still three or four teams that will probably win it,” Mclawhorn said. “Just like every year, there are three or four that are better than all the other teams.”
