Without a contract, will the ACC women’s basketball tournament move from Greensboro?
As the ACC women’s basketball tournament begins in its long-time home on Wednesday, there’s no guarantee Greensboro’s hold on the event will continue next year.
The league’s contract to hold the tournament at the Greensboro Coliseum expires after this week’s event and no site has been selected for next year’s tournament.
Greensboro Coliseum became the women’s tournament’s home in 2000 and this week marks the 23rd time in the last 24 seasons the tournament has been played there. The lone exception was the 2017 tournament, which was moved to Conway, S.C., when the ACC moved all events from North Carolina due to the controversial and since-gutted HB2 “bathroom” bill.
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told The News & Observer that, as with the men’s tournament, the league expects to select future sites over the next few months.
“We haven’t made any decisions on either tournaments,” Phillips said. “We’re working on it. We’ll make something, obviously, coming up in the spring. But Tournament Town has been fabulous for women’s basketball. This week will be another example of it.”
The possibility of moving out of Greensboro
No facility has hosted more ACC women’s tournaments than the Greensboro Coliseum. Back in 2014, the league announced the tournament would stay in Greensboro through 2022 and then extended it to 2023 after the 2017 event moved to South Carolina.
“Greensboro has been incredible hosts for so many years,” said Debbie Antonelli, an ESPN college basketball analyst who regularly works ACC women’s tournament broadcasts. “The business community has grown around the game. That’s important because it brings new fans in. But also, like, I know fans that are going. They plan their week. They get off work. They know exactly where they’re staying. They know where they’re going to eat. They meet other fans from other teams. They hang out. It’s fun. It just has a really welcoming, warm, fan-friendly feel to it.”
The possibility of moving the women’s tournament out of Greensboro comes after the league announced last year it would move its headquarters from Greensboro to Charlotte. Even though the ACC was founded in Greensboro in 1953 at the Sedgefield Inn, the league decided it needed, among other things, to move to a larger metropolitan area with a larger airport.
Last October, during a news conference at the ACC’s preseason media events for the basketball sesaon, Phillips called Greensboro the “perfect venue” without committing to any future tournaments there.
“During my nearly two years in this role, we have and will continue to look at what we do with all of our championships,” Phillips said. “Feedback from our coaches and feedback from our student-athletes really is significant to the conference office and myself. But you also don’t want to mess up a good thing, and so you’ve got to kind of balance those two things.”
As part of the N.C. General Assembly’s deal to pay the ACC $15 million to keep the headquarters in the state, the ACC must, within the next 10 years, hold at least four men’s basketball championships, four women’s basketball championships and four baseball championships in the state in addition to any already scheduled in North Carolina.
The tournament has been held at neutral sites every year since 1981. Fayetteville Civic Center was the site for nine consecutive years from 1983-1991. After a stop in Rock Hill, South Carolina, it was played at Charlotte’s Independence Arena three consecutive years from 1997-99 before moving to Greensboro.
Staff writer Andrew Carter contributed to this article
This story was originally published March 1, 2023 at 10:34 AM with the headline "Without a contract, will the ACC women’s basketball tournament move from Greensboro?."