The Cancun Challenge (Spanish: Desafío Cancún) is a college basketball tournament organized by Triple Crown Sports which currently features eight NCAADivision Imen's basketball teams and ten women's basketball teams. The formats of the men's and women's tournaments have varied from year to year. The men's tournament currently splits the eight teams into two divisions of four and consists of games played in the United States at participants' campus sites followed by a bracketed tournament played in (or near) Cancún, Mexico. The women's tournament splits the ten teams into one division of six and one division of four and each features round-robin play in Cancún with no bracket, and therefore no champion. The two divisions in each tournament are the Riviera Division and the Mayan Division.
The Mexico portion of the event has been held at multiple venues in and around Cancún. The inaugural 2005 tournament was relocated from the Moon Palace Resort to the Aventura Spa Palace Resort in Playa del Carmen shortly before it was scheduled to occur due to damage sustained at the original location from Hurricane Wilma.[1] The tournament was held at one of these two sites each year up until 2014, when it would be moved to the Hard Rock Hotel Riviera Maya, where it has been held since. CBS Sports Network televises the men's Riviera Division games. All Mexico games in the men's Mayan Division along with all women's games are streamed on FloHoops.
Previous men's champions include Vanderbilt (2008), Kentucky (2009), Missouri (2010), Illinois (2011), Wichita State (2012), Wisconsin (2013), Northern Iowa (2014), Maryland (2015), Purdue (2016), LA Tech (2017), Bradley (2018), West Virginia (2019), Clemson (2020), Saint Louis (2021) and Auburn (2022). Previous women's participating teams include marquee programs such as Arizona State, Baylor, Duke, Georgia Tech, Iowa, Iowa State, Kansas State, Maryland, Oklahoma, Purdue, Seton Hall, Stanford, UCLA, and Washington, among others.
