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It happens every couple of years. Someone suggests the NCAA move the first and second rounds of the women’s tournament to neutral sites. This year, the conversation began with a tweet from Ole Miss coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin.
“Neutral sites?” she asked.
The debate picked up steam when Utah was forced to change hotels after being subjected to racially charged threats while staying in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, nearly 30 minutes from their host site, and in a city with a history of white supremacist activity.
It reached a fever pitch when Lynn Holzman, the NCAA vice president of women’s basketball, told ESPN the women’s basketball committee will ask to revisit the tournament format after this season, instead of after the 2025 season.
“Given the trajectory of success we’ve experienced over the last couple of years, I see no reason to wait to start that review,” she told ESPN.
It may be worth reexamining how the first and second rounds are determined, but before doing that, the NCAA should take a look at the regionals (the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight). Simply put, the current system is wrong.
At a time when college women’s basketball is “bursting at the seams,” to borrow a phrase frequently used by Dawn Staley, having just two regional sites is limiting exposure and access.
Hosting the regions in Portland, Oregon, and Albany, New York, about as extreme of locations as one can get, meant that the sites were inconvenient for almost everyone. That includes the teams, media, and fans.
There will always be teams that have to travel, but such distant locales meant everyone was far away. Four regional sites could help mitigate that by holdin the games – wait for it – regionally (there should always be a site in the southeast, where you have South Carolina, NC State, Tennessee, LSU, North Carolina, Duke, Virginia Tech… you get the point).
“We play some pretty good basketball in the Midwest, too, and we’d love to have the opportunity to showcase women’s basketball at its finest in the Midwest,” Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said. “I’m not sure that I love the two extremes that we’re seeing because I think it’s a disadvantage to us. You’ve got UCLA and Colorado flying halfway across the country. Can’t there be something in the middle that helps a little bit?”
The NCAA often quietly points out that cities have to want to host. It’s a fair point, and it’s also clear that the women’s tournament has reached “tweener” status.
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It’s good to have the tournament in midsize cities like Albany, Greenville, and Greensboro. They roll out the red carpet and allow the tournament to take over the city in a good way. In the major cities that often bid for the men’s tournament, such as Los Angeles, Detroit, and Boston, the women’s tournament would get lost.
The problem, and the complaint several coaches hinted at, is the these mid-size cities don’t have the infrastructure, especially the hotel space, for eight teams and the media and fans that follow.
Bluder and LSU’s Kim Mulkey, both in Albany, alluded to dissatisfaction with their hotels without getting into specifics.
“Eight teams have to be accommodated for in Albany,” she said. “When you bring in eight teams, do you have eight hotels that are all of equal value, that are all the same? Probably not. I don’t know how many cities do. That’s a concern.”
Albany is smaller than Columbia, with correspondingly limited hotel space. UCLA and Oregon State had to stay in the same hotel, something that is usually avoided.
This is not to pick on Albany. The host committee did an outstanding job, but the whole thing would have been better with four teams.
It would be better for fans, too. They have to travel, they need hotel rooms, and they need tickets. Unlike the men’s tournament, the women’s tournament still needs to sell tickets (men’s games are actually poorly attended, but because of the television contract which pays out over $900 million per year, ticket sales are a drop in the bucket).
The women’s tournament isn’t ready to play in football stadiums like the men’s, but it can fill four arenas for the Sweet 16, especially if they are within driving distance for fans.
The location also matters for media coverage. National outlets can afford to send reporters anywhere in the country, but for local media it gets expensive. Getting local media to cover teams is critical to the growth of the sport.
(Even in the Final Four, few teams are covered by local media the way South Carolina is. Having local beat writers and every television station cover games is still a dramatic outlier in the sport.)
It’s why Staley jokingly apologized on Wednesday, “I’m sorry we broke your budgets.”
“Our local media has always been there, always have covered our team,” Staley said while in Albany. “It’s pretty cool to see. I hope that every team that’s here sends their local media because they do the heavy lifting of following the teams and getting it out to the national media.”
Future sites have already been determined through 2026 for regionals and 2031 for the Final Four. Next year the regionals are in Birmingham, AL, and Spokane, WA (the same city whose lack of hotels led to the Utah fiasco). In 2026 it is Fort Worth, TX (not Dallas, but at 13,500-seat Dickies Arena) and Sacramento, CA.
The Final Fours are in Tampa, Phoenix, Columbus, OH, Indianapolis, San Antonio, Portland, and Dallas.
Will the NCAA do what’s right? For years it has been accused of holding back women’s basketball and has had to be forced to make changes. Now the notoriously reactive NCAA has a chance to be proactive.
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