The Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference has a new format for its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. The league announced that 10 of 13 teams will qualify for a trip to Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall in March, which marks the first time in the MAAC’s 44-year history that the tournament does not include every team. The change was brought on by the conference’s expansion from 11 to 13 members — Merrimack and Sacred Heart joined from the NEC — and a distaste for the six-game opening day in which the first women’s game started in the morning and the last men’s game didn’t end until well past midnight. “It was very clear from the beginning there was no appetite to separate the men’s and women’s basketball championships,” Commissioner Travis Tellitocci said. “One of the things that was really important to me was that we had to eliminate playing six games in a day. Starting games at 10:30 in the morning and ending them at 1 a.m. on the same day is not a good experience for the coaches, the student-athletes or the fans.” Tellitocci said a two-and-a-half hour window will be allotted for each game. Seeds 7-10 play first-round games on Tuesday, March 11, while seeds 1-6 advance directly to the quarterfinals that begin on Wednesday, March 12. The 8-9 women’s game now starts at noon, with the 7-10 game scheduled for 2:30 p.m. The 8-9 men’s game has a 6 p.m. start, with the 7-10 matchup going off at 8:30 p.m. The rest of the tournament proceeds as it did in years past with championship games on Saturday, March 15. Tellitocci said the league explored several formats, including a 13-team format at a neutral site, a 13-team format beginning at campus sites and a 12-team format before ultimately landings on 10 teams. “Having an odd number of schools made it a little challenging to have a format that didn’t add multiple days to the front end of the tournament,” Tellitocci said. “The coaches and administrators had no desire to bring all 26 teams to a neutral site, so we ultimately landed on a 10-team format. The group felt that created a more streamlined event that not only heightens the tournament atmosphere, but puts an importance on the regular season as well. “… We came to the conclusion that the hurdles we had to jump through to accommodate the bottom of the league is not where we should be spending our time and energy. We just be focusing on spotlighting the teams at the top.” The MAAC has a 20-game regular season schedule, but with the addition of two schools that is now an unbalanced schedule. “That’s one of the things we wrestled with the most,” Tellitocci said, acknowledging some teams will have a harder schedule than others, but it’s something that the league is OK with. “… The more we talked through this, there’s no way to predict where the schools will be in the standings from year to year, especially with the landscape where it is and the transfer portal. We have entire rosters turning over at this point.” Tellitocci said another change he would like to make is to get the tournament final off the Saturday before Selection Sunday when it is competing with the power-conference tournaments. The MAAC used to have a Monday night slot for its title game before moving to Atlantic City. While Atlantic City has provided the neutrality coaches and administrators asked for — the tournament in Albany was played in Siena’s home arena — it forced the schedule to be altered because the NJSIAA Wrestling Championships occupy Boardwalk Hall the first week in March. “There are a lot of dominoes that need to fall to change the current situation,” Tellitocci said. “It won’t happen for 2025, but there’s been a lot of work done behind the scenes over the past year in this area, and really working to ensure we get that visibility back that we lost.”