The Eastern Canada men’s basketball teams make up the bottom three tournament seeds for this weekend’s national championships and all have tough first-round match-ups.

Dalhousie University, ranked sixth overall, will face off against the defending national champions, the University of Saskatchewan Huskies, in the Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) Final 8 quarterfinals. Dalhousie rounded off its season with the Atlantic University Sport (AUS) championship, blowing away Acadia University 78-47.

“Our goal is to win a national championship. I think we are taking it slowly and we have a huge challenge with Saskatchewan being defending national champions and a very good team, a very talented team,” said Dalhousie Tigers head coach John Campbell.

But the Tigers may get an edge up with the home-court advantage. The whole CIS tournament will be played at Halifax’s Metro Centre, where the Tigers won the regional title March 6.

“The advantage for us is that we have just spent a weekend playing in the venue. […] We know how things work. We’re hopeful that we will have a bit of a home-court advantage from the fan perspective,” Campbell said.

The Dal Tigers racked up a mediocre 14-6 regular season record, followed by two playoff wins to take the AUS title.

The AUS runners-up Acadia University Axemen qualified for the Final 8, with a shoddy 7-13 regular season record and 2-1 in playoffs.

As the eighth seed, the Axeman will play the number-one ranked University of British Columbia in the quarters.

Head coach Steve Baur said he knows his team is the underdog and that they are just happy to be there. “I think our goal is to go there and play tough. We’ve been at the Metro Centre now for three games. I think we are going to give UBC a little bit of a run and see what we can do in the first round.”

In order to compete for the national title Baur said his team will have to be more consistent. “Any time we’ve gone through a big emotional win for us, we’ve had a hard time bouncing back the next day. […] We know we can play with all of the top teams, but we have got to be able to do it on back-to-back days, which we haven’t done yet this year.”

The young team will struggle with playing three big games in a row, Bauer said.

“We play a lot of our young guys big minutes and they take quite a pounding from some of those big guys from the other teams. So if we can find a way to share some minutes, that’d be good.”

The seventh-seeded Concordia Stingers are the lone Quebec team in the running for national championships. Concordia won the Réseau du sport étudiant du Québec (RSEQ) championships March 4, the team’s fourth regional title since 2005. They had a tight season and are entering the tournament with a solid 12-4 regular season record and 2-0 playoff record.

But in its last two CIS Final 8 appearances, Concordia has been stung hard in the first round. In 2007, the Stingers were the number-one seed and lost 63-62 in a first-round upset to the eight-seeded St. Mary’s Huskies.

The next time the Stingers qualified for the CIS Final 8 was in 2009, where they were seeded seventh and knocked out again in round one.

Up against Carleton, Concordia has a huge mountain to climb in this year’s quarter-finals and the Stingers are just hoping to be able to compete, said head coach John Dore.

Dore said going up against the “mighty Carleton Ravens” will be their toughest challenge in Halifax.

Even though Carleton got hit with its first loss of the season – losing in an emotional Ontario final to Lakehead – and Concordia is hot off a regional championship win, Dore said Carleton is coming in with all of the advantages.

“I think Carleton has all of the advantages going in: they’re stronger, they’re skilled, they’ve been there before,” Dore said.

Meanwhile Concordia has a very young team; for nine of the 12 players who will dress for the tournament, this will be their first run at nationals, Dore said.

“We’re happy to be there. We use it as a builing block for us for the future. We have everybody eligible to come back again next year,” Dore said.

All three Eastern teams are ranked below the tournament wild card Trinity Western (5).