Neutral site for HL Tourney?

[wh]

Just noticed this tweet on Paul Oren's twitter page:

Tom Mieskoski ‏@CSUVikingsHoops  37m
Gary Waters said that the Horizon League Tournament could be moved to a neutral site as early as next year.

https://twitter.com/NWIOren

Paul suggests Indy as a possible site.  Any thoughts?

[valpo64]

Fort Wayne should be considered also. It would be a good, centrally located venue.

[vu72]

What we don't want is a 20,000 seat venue.  I'm thinking 8-10,000 seats.  Not sure where that would be, maybe Tulsa!! 

[LaPorteAveApostle]

Oh, brilliant, a sports event in Indy.  Talk about your untapped markets!  And certainly no one ever does a conference tourney there. 
THE HORIZON LEAGUE:  THINKING THE BOX OUTSIDE

I think the home-court advantage for the top seed is the way to go.  It's a reward for the fans as well as the team.  And the HL was smart to build the escape valve in case of upset, and so not only did GB's fans get to watch games, so did WSU's. 

(Fat lot of good it did them, but still.  It's a reward.  Your reward is: watching your team @#% the bed LIVE! 
Hey, at least Ray McCallum didn't dunk on you.)

The home court is the last vestige of saying that the entire regular season means anything.  Otherwise, it's just "who can get hot in Peoria for 72 hours and ruin everything for everyone?"  (Sounds like there's a movie in there somewhere...)

Without the home-court, the HL tourney might as well be a blind Indiana high school sectional draw.  "Uh-oh, YSU drew Oakland.  And CSU doesn't have to play until Friday night."

That's the teams.  As for the fans:  the fans that will travel, are going to travel.  Some fans MIGHT travel, and some will not.  (Like Travis Bader's offense:  TRIAGE)

Having the game in your gym is the only way to get all three groups.  Only the first group and some part of the second will go to Indy, a town at least 2.5 hours from the nearest school.  Hell, South Bend, Grand Rapids, Fort Wayne would at least be more convenient to people.

Bottom line:  the soul of college basketball is in the gyms, not played in a Tri-County Conglomerate Soulless Multiplex.  Take a look at this section of the COVER of the CIT media guide and it sums it all up.

As Steve Rosenbloom once wrote in the Trib, "good guys wear black.  empty seats wear blue."

[wh]

According to CSU beat writer Tom Mieskoski, Gary Waters mentioned that some HL coaches are pushing this and Chicago and Indianapolis are possible sites.  I don't know if those locations are Waters' thoughts, or something more than that.

https://twitter.com/CSUVikingsHoops

[LaPorteAveApostle]

some HL coaches are pushing this

well, admittedly, if i were coaching any one of a few of these teams, i'd know i was never going to host in my lifetime, and so rather than spend 3-4 out of every 5 years in valparaiso indiana...sure, i might look to get out of that.

[Kyle321n]

some HL coaches are pushing this

well, admittedly, if i were coaching any one of a few of these teams, i'd know i was never going to host in my lifetime, and so rather than spend 3-4 out of every 5 years in valparaiso indiana...sure, i might look to get out of that.

You say that like UIC will make it past Tuesday.

[a3uge]

Dumb. The neutral site mid major tourneys are the worst to watch on TV. The crowds are sparse and it's not as fun when the home team winds. A better solution would be for Valpo to eliminate that inane 2 week long spring break.

[valpotx]

Absolutely moronic idea.  Why the heck would you take away the fans for the conference tournament?  I went to each of the conference tournaments while I was in school, and Valpo was the ONLY team who traveled well to Fort Wayne and Kansas City.  It would be fairly similar for a neutral site tournament in the HL in either Chicago or Indianapolis, where it would still be mostly Valpo fans.  While that would be good for us, it's looks terrible on any kind of TV.  Taking away the #1 seed getting home court advantage is dumb for the league as well.  Even though it didn't work out for GB this year, or us 2 seasons ago, it makes it much more likely that a 5 or below seed can win the tournament, and reward us with more 15 seeds each year...

[Dave_2010]

I typically go to the semis and/or finals of the MAC tournament in Cleveland every year. Overall, the games are hit and miss, largely dependent on the programs playing. Naturally, Akron and Kent draw huge crowds...when they play each other, the crowd is absolutely electric. The league (and arena) are lucky that in 15 years the final has featured one or both of those schools 12 times (by my count). Ohio and Miami can pull in a decent crowd as well.

This year was an example of the bad side if that coin. Toledo played Western Michigan and the place was a ghost town. To make a neutral site tournament work, you need fanbases that travel well or are locally relevant in the market. Since most of the league members have uninvolved alumni and can't make a dent with the local media, I think our tourney would look more like this year's in Cleveland as opposed to the Akron/Kent showdown that can make the games so fun.


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[vu72]

Dumb. The neutral site mid major tourneys are the worst to watch on TV. The crowds are sparse and it's not as fun when the home team winds. A better solution would be for Valpo to eliminate that inane 2 week long spring break.

You mean like when Green Bay "blew" it??   

[wh]

A few years ago Ghostofdylan said once you host the host the tourney you'll feel differently about the double bye setup. He was right. I think the same is true about holding the tournament at the site of the no. 1 seed. That said, I wonder if CSU has ever hosted the semis and finals?  In other words maybe Waters is like we were before we hosted - just seeing the negatives because he's never experienced the benefits?  Could the other coaches that are supposedly disenchanted with the current setup be in the same boat. Conversely, I would be surprised if Bryce would be interested in a neutral site, or any of the other coaches of teams that have hosted in the recent past - Donlon, Wardle, and Jeter.

[valporun]

I like the idea of the regular season champion hosting the second round and semis, with hopes of winning the semi-final game to host the final for your home fans, but doing a neutral site gets very costly, and can run into trouble trying to find hotel space close to the facility/arena in Indy or Chicago with all the B1G teams in town. I mean unless the intended host of Indy is IUPUI's gym, Banker's Life Fieldhouse is busy the entire week with both the women's and men's tourneys going on, and the same if it's in Chicago, so unless you want to rotate sites every other year between Indy and Chicago, you run the major risk of losing so much money and giving yourself more frustration trying to get hotel rooms and remembering which city is hosting a year before the tourney starts. Worst case scenario would be to rotate the host school, so each year a new HL school hosts the tourney at their place.

[zvillehaze]

A few years ago Ghostofdylan said once you host the host the tourney you'll feel differently about the double bye setup. He was right. I think the same is true about holding the tournament at the site of the no. 1 seed. That said, I wonder if CSU has ever hosted the semis and finals?  In other words maybe Waters is like we were before we hosted - just seeing the negatives because he's never experienced the benefits?  Could the other coaches that are supposedly disenchanted with the current setup be in the same boat. Conversely, I would be surprised if Bryce would be interested in a neutral site, or any of the other coaches of teams that have hosted in the recent past - Donlon, Wardle, and Jeter.

You answered before I could ask the question ... you weren't a big fan a few years ago.     http://valpofans.proboards.com/thread/4269/double-bye-tournament#page=1

Not to derail the thread, but any chance the league would consider changing the format if they go to a neutral site?  Also, playing the women's tourney at the same site would certainly lessen the stress on schools' administrative resources.

[StlVUFan]

It's interesting to me that when I heard about this last night, changing the format was not part of the discussion.  I realized that having a neutral site doesn't mean you can't still have the double-byes, etc.

From the conference's point of view, I have no idea why they would decide to do this after the huge selling job they've done over the years on how great this whole thing is.  The draw of playing on as many home courts as possible is intuitively obvious.  3 times on Tuesday, once on Saturday, and once on Tuesday, you should be able to play in front of packed crowds that look good on TV, as opposed to Kemper Arena where the ESPN cameras have to work hard to create the illusion of a single deck venue.

All that seems so obvious to me that I hesitate there's any momentum to this idea yet, though I suppose if enough coaches convince enough presidents, momentum will come.

(by the by, if Gary Waters ever wants to figure out the 2-3 matchup, he could have hosted the championship game this year; last time he won that game as the 2 seed was 2008)

From my own perspective, as a fan of sports rather than sportz, I would love the idea of a neutral site on the order of the UMAC (capacity 6000, I think?) centrally located, have it host both mens and womens tournaments (and maybe change the women's tourney to use the men's format -- never understood why what was so great for the men was a bad idea for the women).  As I did from 2002 through 2007, I would go every year and soak up 16 games of college basketball and have a ball mixing it up with fans from other teams.  I miss doing that.  Currently, the most I can see is 5 games, and for better or worse, the only way I think I'd be interested in attending the women's tourney is if Valpo were hosting both tourneys, which I don't see happening anytime soon.

And from that angle, I don't give a damn what it looks like on TV, nor do I care enough about resulting seed in NCAA tourney.  I really don't.  I'm perfectly fine (this *is* a change for me) with the double-byes, but I want to see all the games in person.  ALL OF THEM.  I want to hang out with Jimmy Lemke and Titan Reg and my CSU twitter friend and my friends at Oakland, etc.

[LaPorteAveApostle]

(by the by, if Gary Waters ever wants to figure out the 2-3 matchup, he could have hosted the championship game this year; last time he won that game as the 2 seed was 2008)

i ZING what you did there...

But STL, you're a fan of the first order--you would go/will go/have gone whether they hold it in Toledo, Reno, the Aleutian Islands, or Pluto the Non-Planet.  So, and I mean this as nicely as possible, it might not mean as much what your group of fans think as much as much as what it will take to get the fence-sitters off and committed to attending.

[zvillehaze]

It shows my age, but I've seen the HL (MCC1/MCC2) use a variety of approches ... pre-determined hosts (determined by rotation or bid process), neutral sites and the current.  The big benefit of the current is a home crowd environment for your championship.

Most point to Butler losing in '02 as the sole impetus for the change, but that year also featured a UIC vs. Loyola championship game played in, where else, Cleveland.  That doesn't make for an impressive show on ESPN and probably prompted moving the championship to a home site.

[valpo64]

Have not other conferences in recent years followed the Horizon League's format for hosting tournament games?  If that is the case, it says something about our current format being a good way to go, doesn't it?

[historyman]

If the HL does decide to go to a neutral site for the tourney might I suggest one of the big high school gyms in Indiana that is not being used as a regional or semi-state site. Such as New Castle, Anderson, Southport, Seymour, Marion, Michigan City, Huntington etc.

[FWalum]

If the HL does decide to go to a neutral site for the tourney might I suggest one of the big high school gyms in Indiana that is not being used as a regional or semi-state site. Such as New Castle, Anderson, Southport, Seymour, Marion, Michigan City, Huntington etc.

Would sound like a reasonable idea, but remember that unless the court is one that could be changed to college length this would not work.  I think most if not all of those locations are fixed length high school courts.

[Big D]

If the HL does decide to go to a neutral site for the tourney might I suggest one of the big high school gyms in Indiana that is not being used as a regional or semi-state site. Such as New Castle, Anderson, Southport, Seymour, Marion, Michigan City, Huntington etc.

I don't think it is possible to come up with an idea that is a worse message than playing your conference tournament in a high school gym.  You might as well just give up and say that your conference is an irrelevant low major because all you can fill up is a freaking high school gym.

[LaPorteAveApostle]

As much as it grieves me to have to do so, I must cosign Big D's post.

Twice.

[crusaderjoe]

If the HL does decide to go to a neutral site for the tourney might I suggest one of the big high school gyms in Indiana that is not being used as a regional or semi-state site. Such as New Castle, Anderson, Southport, Seymour, Marion, Michigan City, Huntington etc.

Valpo has hosted the HL tourney already; therefore, the League has already held its tournament at a high school facility.

[LaPorteAveApostle]

[historyman]

New Castle is 9,000+ seat gym. It is a lot more than your typical high school gym. It is the largest high school gym in a state that has 9 of the 10 largest high school gyms in the country. It's almost twice as big as Valpo's ARC where the HL tourney has been held twice and very close to the size of Wright State's Nutter Center. It's certainly not a "normal" high school gym.








State   City   Venue   Capacity
1   Indiana   New Castle   New Castle Fieldhouse   9,325[1]
2   Indiana   East Chicago   John A. Baratto Athletic Center   8,296[1]
3   Indiana   Seymour   Lloyd E. Scott Gymnasium   8,110[1]
4   Indiana   Richmond   Tiernan Center   8,100[3]
5   Indiana   Marion   Bill Green Athletic Arena   7,560 [4]
6   Texas   Dallas   Alfred J. Loos Fieldhouse   7,500[1]
7   Indiana   Elkhart   North Side Gymnasium   7,373[1]
8   Indiana   Michigan City   "The Wolves' Den" Gym   7,304[1]
9   Indiana   Gary   West Side High School Gym   7,217[1]
10   Indiana   Lafayette   Jefferson High School Gym   7,200[5]
11   Indiana   Indianapolis   Southport High School Gym   7,124[5]
12   Indiana   Washington   "The Hatchet House"   7,090[6]
13   Indiana   Columbus   Memorial Gymnasium   7,071[5]
14=   Arizona   Chinle   Wildcat Den   7,000[7]
14=   Kentucky   Somerset   Pulaski County High School Gym   7,000[8]

The Wright State University Nutter Center (originally Ervin J. Nutter Center and commonly Nutter Center) is a multi-purpose arena located at Wright State University in Fairborn, Ohio. In addition to hosting the Wright State Raiders basketball team, the Nutter Center serves as a music venue for touring concerts and shows. High schools in the area also commonly use the arena to host graduation ceremonies.

Capacity   10,400 (Basketball)

So the Nutter Center is used for high school events so I really don't see there is a big difference. You just hate the thought of it being owned by a high school.