Bay Area March Madness on the move?
SAN JOSE — The NCAA basketball circus came to town again Thursday night. The whole package. The cheerleaders. The screaming coaches. The referee-hectoring fans. The goofy and vaguely sinister mascots. (Seriously, have you seen that West Virginia Mountaineer up close? He’s armed!)
And this time around, as a quiet subtext, there is a friendly if intense future turf war gurgling through the proceedings. At stake is the site of future March Madness in the Bay Area. Will it keep happening in San Jose and at SAP Center? Or will it shift to San Francisco and Chase Center, the Warriors’ new arena under construction south of AT&T Park?
We’ll possibly get a big clue next month when the NCAA announces its next batch of tournament sites from 2019 through 2021.
This weekend’s West Regional semifinals and finals at the Shark Tank are the sixth visit of NCAA men’s tourna-
ment games to the South Bay — and the fourth visit within the last 11 years. The NCAA requires a local institution or conference to host the games. San Jose, behind local organizers and arena management, has successfully partnered with various local universities and conferences, as well as Sharks’ management, to become the NCAA’s go-to spot in March. No local venue or city has hosted more Madness games.
However, the injection of Chase Center into the marketplace is bound to change that equation.
In fact, it may already be happening. One well-connected source says that the Pac 12 conference, which is co-sponsoring this week’s Regional, has already been working with the Warriors to submit a bid for future March Madness games. A conference spokesman said Thursday night that he could not confirm that information. But that’s a minor detail, really. If not with the Pac12, the Warriors will certainly be working with some local entity — Stanford, Cal, USF or St. Mary’s — to bring NCAA games to their state-of-the-art venue, scheduled to open in 2019 or 2020.
I mean, why wouldn’t the NBA team go after the Madness? The idea of any sports facility is to fill dates and fill seats. The Warriors’ arena is being built with basketball sightlines. And San Francisco is one of the country’s most attractive visitor destinations.
San Jose, though, is not giving up without a strategic campaign plan. Patricia Ernstrom, executive director of the San Jose Sports Authority, thinks the city’s past history will play a large role in keeping SAP as a preferred hoops hot spot.
“One of the things that’s important to the NCAA is long-term relationships,” Ernstrom said. “Our feeling is that we’ll continue to be an attractive community for them because we’ve had a good track record of achieving certain goals. The other reason is, we have the opportunity in San Jose to make them a big deal and put them on center stage. It’s a big, national shiny thing. But it’s still a community deal at heart.”
Translation: College basketball tournament games could get swallowed up in the conventionrich, tourist-clogged environment of San Francisco. In San Jose, the sports authority gussies up downtown with banners and sets up attractions at Chavez Plaza. Ernstrom and her organization have also learned to work with different partners through the years and definitely know how to fill out the bid papers to emphasize the city’s assets.
As an example, in bidding for this next batch of games, the SJSA is working with the West Coast Conference, which previously successfully hosted 2013 first and second round games at SAP, then known as HP Pavilion. Six sets of games will be awarded in mid-April — in the first weekend early round and the second weekend regional — and San Jose has said it can host any of them. With the Warriors’ arena completion date uncertain, it can only assure the NCAA that it will be available for the 2021 tournament.
Lynn Holzman, the West Coast Conference commissioner, was in attendance at Thursday’s games and was eager to list San Jose’s advantages.
“Having the commitment from the mayor and an active, organized community-supported body like the sports authority is important for a conference like ours and for the NCAA,” Holzman said. “I think that’s where you see the NCAA going back to a city again and again.”
Holzman also noted that when the NCAA makes decisions on the basketball tournament, it considers a city’s past interactions in other sports and other events. For example, when last year’s Women’s Soccer Cup needed to find a new site on short notice because it pulled out of North Carolina when the state passed the so-called “bathroom law,” San Jose stepped up and volunteered Avaya Stadium and helped pull together the event in a quick 56 days.
Also, there’s more than just an arena rental agreement involved when the NCAA awards games to various sites. Hotel rooms need to be blocked out for each team. A transportation system must be implemented for the schools’ traveling parties. Hundreds of volunteers must be recruited to lubricate the tournament machinery.
San Francisco has no sports authority. Neither does Oakland, which could be one reason it has hosted March Madness three times and not since 2006. But you can figure that the San Francisco Convention and Visitors’ Bureau will jump aboard any NCAA tournament-seeking efforts.
John Tortora, the Sharks’ chief operating officer, may be the best salesman for San Jose’s efforts. He notes that his building has staged successful events for the NFL (Super Bowl Media Night), NCAA, NHL and NBA, as well as US Figure Skating and USA Gymnastics.
“It’s about relationships,” Tortora said. “We have 25 years with a proven track record of success ... I think it’s also important to know that the competition for us isn’t necessarily Chase Center. The competition is the entire Pacific Time Zone and all of the venues in the time zone. We’ve competed against all of them over the years and our track record is very good.”
The best guess here? The NCAA will spread around the wealth. Future games will be awarded to San Francisco, Sacramento (where the new Golden 1 Center successfully hosted first round games last week) and in San Jose. It likely means the Madness will only visit San Jose every six or seven years rather than every three or four years.
But look at it this way: In the end, with the addition of Chase Center to the rotation, Northern California hoop fans will see even more high-level college basketball. Anyone have any problem with that?
(Don’t ask the Mountaineer. His team lost Thursday. And he’s still armed.)