The Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference has been hopping from city to city trying to make its basketball tournaments a success. It hopes that the next stop, Winston-Salem, will be the right move.
MEAC officials awarded the conferences men's and women's basketball tournaments to Winston-Salem and Joel Coliseum on Tuesday afternoon for the next three years. The contract will begin with the 2008-09 tournament scheduled for March 10-15. All men's and women's games will be played at Joel Coliseum.
Commissioner Dennis Thomas of the MEAC praised Winston-Salem for having all the ingredients to grow the tournament.
"Every time we voted or talked about where this tournament was going it always came up Winston-Salem," Thomas said.
Winston-Salem beat out Raleigh, where the tournament was held the last three years, as well as Norfolk, Va., according to sources. Thomas would not reveal the cities that Winston-Salem beat out.
The proposal the city put together to lure the tournament included a $100,000 package with $25,000 coming from Winston-Salem State, one of the newest members of the conference. The rest of the $75,000 came from the city.
WSSU helping to land the tournament is slightly different from the early 1990s when the city landed the Division II CIAA Tournament for six years. As part of the proposal to that conference in 1993 WSSU didn't have to help with the finances. The CIAA stayed for six years from 1994 to 1999.
Thomas says that with he would like to boost attendance figures to 50,000 by the third year of the contract. Last year in Raleigh at the RBC Center 38,228 fans attended for the week.
Thomas says that since 2005, when just 15,000 fans attended the tournament in Richmond, Va., attendance has been on the rise. He hopes that trend will continue now that the tournament will be held in a city with a MEAC school. The last two cities where the tournament was held there wasn't an anchor school.
However, WSSU, still in transition to Division I, won't be eligible for next year's tournament.
"I think it's a buy-in of the city," Thomas said. "You need a progressive city with great and strong leadership that can do those things to move the tournament forward. We think with an anchor university like Winston-Salem State, which is a tremendous university, I'm comfortable with where this tournament is going."
Thomas said that to boost attendance figures for the championship games on March 15 that WSSU and N.C. Central, a hopeful MEAC member, will play in another bonus game. That bonus game was well received in Raleigh this past year.
N.C. Central, which left the CIAA and is also in transition to Division I, hasn't been accepted in the MEAC yet. The conference has a moratorium on expansion that was not lifted at last week's spring meetings, meaning N.C. Central is still in limbo. Thomas wouldn't say when the moratorium will be lifted.
Thomas has big plans for attendance to increase that some might call unrealistic.
"We think in a three-year period we can increase our attendance to that 50,000 paid attendance," Thomas said. "Now, if after the 2009 tournament, and we have 35,000, then I have to pause for concern. But we don't forecast that."
Mayor Allen Joines of Winston-Salem said that landing a tournament such as the MEAC, whose winners in the women's and men's tournaments get automatic bids to the NCAA Tournament, is a big deal.
"I think it's a tremendous honor for Winston-Salem," Joines said. "As I told the commissioner their tournament is growing and that we can help him grow the tournament to the level he would like to see it."
Bob McCoy, the president of the Forsyth County Tourism Development Authority, compared what it was like when the CIAA came to Winston-Salem in the 1994.
"We were instrumental in growing the CIAA years ago…," McCoy said. "It grew so well it went right out of town to a bigger city but that's all right.
"We plan to put as much effort and passion in marketing the MEAC and into helping it grow to be the best that it can be."
Thomas says that for the tournament to grow the city will have to do its part. "We are going to have to do some very great marketing and promoting, something we feel the city has the expertise to do," he said.
John Dell can be reached at 727-4081 or at jdell@wsjournal.com
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