Cancún Challenge Champions

Full list of Cancún Challenge champions, including head coach, by year. The Cancún Challenge is an early season Division I men’s college basketball tournament that has taken place annually in November since 2008. The field of eight is separated into two groups of four: the Riviera Division (high- to mid-majors) and Mayan Division (mid- to low-majors). The events starts with on-campus games, then all eight teams travel to Cancún for two separate four-team tournaments. Since 2014, the tournament games have been played at the Hard Rock Hotel Riviera Convention Center. The first team and coach listed each year were the winners of the Riviera bracket, with the second team and coach being the winners of the Mayan bracket.

Year	Champion	Head Coach
2008	Vanderbilt	Kevin Stallings
2009	Kentucky	John Calipari
	Sam Houston State	Bob Marlin
2010	Missouri	Mike Anderson
	North Florida	Matthew Driscoll
2011	Illinois	Bruce Weber
	Lipscomb	Scott Sanderson
2012	Wichita State	Gregg Marshall
	Gardner-Webb	Chris Holtmann
2013	Wisconsin	Bo Ryan
	Oral Roberts	Scott Sutton
2014	Northern Iowa	Ben Jacobson
	North Florida (2)	Matthew Driscoll (2)
2015	Maryland	Mark Turgeon
	South Dakota State	Scott Nagy
2016	Purdue	Matt Painter
	Georgia State	Ron Hunter
2017	Louisiana Tech	Eric Konkol
	Montana State	Brian Fish
2018	Bradley	Brian Wardle
	Jacksonville State	Ray Harper
2019	West Virginia	Bob Huggins
	Gardner-Webb (2)	Tim Craft
2020*	Clemson	Brad Brownell
2021	Saint Louis	Travis Ford
	Middle Tennessee	Nick McDevitt
2022	Auburn	Bruce Pearl
	Southern Miss	Jay Ladner
2023	James Madison	Mark Byington
	Radford	Darris Nichols
2024

*2020 event was held at Titan Field House in Melbourne, FL (rebranded as the Space Coast Classic) due to COVID-19 concerns and there was just one bracket of four teams

 

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