Venerable Basketball Tournament Faces Extinction
“Keep C.I.T.! Keep C.I.T.!”
That was the chant that rose from the packed gym on the campus of Concordia University Wisconsin last year about this time. The final game of the penultimate Concordia Invitational Tournament (C.I.T.) had just wrapped up, and students and fans of the four participating universities – all named Concordia – united in a lengthy vocal plea to administrators not to scrub the basketball tournament after the 2025 edition.
That 2025 event, scheduled for this weekend, January 24–25, at Concordia Ann Arbor (MI), is slated to be the farewell meeting of what is one of the more unique, and long-running, athletic events in U.S. history. Joining the host Concordia for the 72nd annual C.I.T. will be basketball teams, men’s and women’s, from Concordia Nebraska, Concordia Chicago, and Concordia Wisconsin.
The event brings together athletes, rowdy and energetic student sections, pep bands, dance teams, cheerleading squads, and hundreds of invested alumni from four Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) universities at the campus of one of those schools for a basketball tournament. The event is infused with the fierce aggression and competitiveness endemic to modern athletics, yet it is marked by religious camaraderie and an unstated, and historic, sense of unity. Following the final game, after all-tournament teams are named and other awards are presented, the entire gymnasium, participants and fans of all four schools, is led by the home university campus pastor in a biblical devotion and joins in singing the Common Doxology.
The tournament has been held on a yearly basis since 1951 – with a lacuna in 1976 because of scheduling conflicts and two cancellations, in 2021 and 2022, due to COVID-19.
However, officials at two participating schools have decided the 2025 tournament will be their last. Concordia Wisconsin and Concordia Ann Arbor are moving on, “to pursue new traditions that better serve our athletic programs and engage our student body,” according to Concordia Wisconsin president Erik Ankerberg. Their departure leaves but two schools in the tournament field and effectively cancels the event permanently. (In a decision unrelated to the C.I.T., Ann Arbor announced in June 2024 that it was discontinuing intercollegiate athletics altogether after the 2024–2025 school year.)
The tournament was the brainchild of Coach Eldon “Pete” Pederson, of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. In 1950 the assistant professor conceived the idea of bringing the LCMS’s four culminating institutions together for a basketball tournament. These were the synod’s two teachers colleges, which supplied elementary and high school instructors for the synod’s extensive parochial-school network, located in River Forest, Illinois, and Seward, Nebraska, and its two seminaries, one in St. Louis, the other in Springfield, Illinois.
All four were named Concordia (as were, at the time, eight synodical junior colleges – do I have to mention that Concordia is a popular Missouri Synod name?). Ergo, the Concordia Invitational Tournament.
The inaugural tournament in 1951 was won by St. Louis, who defeated River Forest in the championship game, 50–40. St. Louis, under Pederson’s wily leadership, dominated the early years of the C.I.T., winning 16 championships between 1951 and 1973, including the first nine, from 1951 to 1959. However, since the early 1980s, the tourney has been dominated by Concordia Nebraska – 28 men’s titles, including two separate streaks of seven in a row (1986–1992 and 1999–2005). The Nebraska women have been even more dominant, winning the title 32 times since a four-school format was adopted in 1973; included in those victories have been 11 championships in a row (1996–2006) and the current streak of nine in a row (2014–2024; 2021 and 2022 were canceled due to COVID-19).
Over the years, Concordias have come and Concordias have gone. The Springfield seminary dropped out of the rota in the 1960s, and in 1967 Concordia St. Paul (MN), which had just become a four-year college, rounded out the tournament, competing until 2001. The St. Louis seminary left the tournament in 1994, and the synodical college in Mequon, Wisconsin, replaced it in the four-school field. Ann Arbor joined in 2002, and has been a permanent participant since.
The cords of allegiance were a little stronger in earlier years, when all schools were near-exclusive training institutions for ministerial work in the LCMS and no athletic scholarships were given. Kids from Seward, River Forest, and St. Paul were playing against men from St. Louis. The former would teach in Missouri Synod schools in congregations that were pastored by members of the latter. It made for intense competition undergirded by shared Christian faith.
The schools still train church workers these days but have opened their doors to general liberal arts students. The names on the fronts of the uniforms are still the same, though, and the loyalties still run deep and the rivalry between Concordias is as intense as it ever was.
A change.org petition to save the tournament established last year captures how many feel about the C.I.T. “Beyond the guise of a simple athletic tournament lies a deeper community all united by the Gospel message. No other opportunity exists to bring our communities together and without it, future Concordia students lose this life changing experience.”
When that final horn sounds in Ann Arbor on January 25, the participants and fans of the four Concordias will link arms to mark the conclusion of C.I.T. by singing the Common Doxology.
Most if not all of them will hope it is not for the last time.
