This past weekend, seven men embarked on a journey to St. Cloud, Minn. where they represented the University of Wisconsin-Superior men’s basketball club in a two-day basketball tournament.

This was the first time that the basketball club played in a tournament and it just happened to be a regional tournament for the National Campus Championship Series (NCCS). Most of the time, everyone was just meeting at set times and playing pickup games. This past weekend was a change of pace from the usual pickup with a little more competitiveness.

The seven men who represented the club were: Daniel James Bressler, Kyle Theis, Seth McKenzie, Peter Vukelich, Monte Stewart, Micah Kantonen, and Simon Rousset.

The team started out on their adventure this past Saturday morning, leaving the Markovich Wellness Center parking lot at 5:15 a.m.

Their first game was at 11:00 a.m. where they played a team from the University of North Dakota. The game was tight throughout and it came down to the wire. McKenzie hit a shot as time expired to give the Yellowjackets the win 48-46.

Their next game wasn’t until 2:30 p.m. when they played a team from DePaul University. The UW-Superior club team started out slow, which happened to be the case all day. They were down 19 at half to DePaul, but fought back to within three points before losing that game by 10 with a final score of 62-72.

Coming into the third game the team was pretty gassed having already played two full games with only seven guys. They played a Minnesota State University-Mankato team. Again, the Yellowjackets came out sluggish. They were down by almost 10 points at half. They came back and fought hard to take the lead in the closing seconds. A hail mary throw and buzzer-beater shot from the Mankato squad ended up sending the game into overtime. The game ended with UWS losing in double overtime by the final score of 79-84.

The UW-Superior basketball finished day one with a 1-2 record which came them the seven seed going into Sunday. They had to play UW-LaCrosse in the first round the following morning at 11 a.m.

They ended up only being able to play the first ten minutes of the game because a power outage occurred in the area of St. Cloud where they happened to be playing.

The basketball club waited around for almost two and a half hours, hoping that the power would come back on so they could finish the game. The rest of the games ended up getting moved from St. Cloud State University to a local high school ten blocks away.

This did not occur until after the basketball club decided to leave because they did not want to have to wait any longer because they were not sure when the power was going to come back on.

UW-LaCrosse ended up going on and winning the tournament. They qualified for the NCCS national tournament in Austin, Texas in April.

The club was started by UW-Superior student Simon Rousset.

“I started the club because I saw many people playing pickup ball at random times," Simon Rousset, co-president of the club said. "I think sport is important, and in the USA, most importantly, especially in college where a few people actually continue sport after high school.”

For the team's first tournament of it's kind, Rousset says the team did pretty well.

“Tourney went extremely well," Rousset said. "We were kind of going there to see how we could organize such an event. We also wanted to play more competition, see where our club stands on the region."