The 1953 NAIA basketball tournament was held in March at Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Missouri.
The 16th annual NAIA basketball tournament featured 32 teams playing in a single-elimination format.
It was the first time since 1937 and 1938, the first two years of the tournament, that the same team would win the national championship title.
Perennial staples to the tournament, only a handful of years have been absence of a Nazarene University playing.
Many of the records set by the 1953 tournament have been broken, and many of the awards were established much later: