NCAA TOURNAMENT Alltel Arena subregional : The star system
Posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2008
It is well known that
the NCAA Tournament
Selection Committee sequesters itself in a hotel suite for days while selecting and seeding the basketball teams that make up the 65-team bracket. What’s not common knowledge is that another NCAA committee does much the same thing with a host site’s hotels, seeding the hotels in terms of quality and assigning the highest-seeded teams to the highest-quality hotels.
Occasionally, there is a disparity in hotel quality, especially back when the NCAA encouraged a one-teamper-hotel policy.
That should not be the case this week when, for the first time, central Arkansas plays host to eight teams competing in the NCAA Tournament.
Three hotels in Little Rock and one in North Little Rock will serve the teams assigned to the Alltel Arena subregional. The Peabody Hotel in downtown Little Rock will house media and NCAA staff.
The five hotels were selected after tournament host UALR provided the NCAA with a list of prospects, a process that began in 2004 when UALR first applied to host a regional.
NCAA staffers made two trips to central Arkansas — in mid-December and again in early January — to evaluate the hotels and Alltel Arena.
“We go as a staff and we split up and go to every site,” said David Warlock, the associate director of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball championships. “The hosts and the personnel will tell us which hotels they picked and how they rank. We look at rooms, meeting space, the suite where the coaches will stay. We’ll look at the shower heads. We’ll check the overall quality of the hotel. We want to know how flexible they are with room accommodations and the food.”
Four hotels were selected and seeded to host the teams in the tournament. The top two seeds get the top hotel, the next two get the second hotel and so on.
The Doubletree Hotel in downtown Little Rock will house No. 7 seed Miami and No. 8 seed Mississippi State. The Crowne Plaza Hotel on Shackleford Road in west Little Rock will host No. 9 seed Oregon and No. 10 seed Saint Mary’s. The Little Rock Hilton on University Avenue is the hotel for Austin Peay and Texas-Arlington, the Nos. 15 and 16 seeds in the South respectively.
“The NCAA has very, very specific rules that we have to follow,” said Becki Lewis, general manager for the Wyndham Hotel in North Little Rock, where No. 1 and No. 2 seeds Memphis and Texas will stay. “There’s quite an extensive contract that we have to follow. It seems like that every question that we have, we have to turn to the manual to see what the NCAA says.”
UALR officials looked for eight hotels when they first applied to host a subregional in 2004. They came up with six, and the NCAA allowed that, with the idea that they would eventually be able to come up with eight.
“We presented the NCAA with the information from the hotels,” said David Russell, director of sales for the Arkansas River Cities Sports Commission, who helped UALR put together its proposal. “They then chose the ones they wanted to use. It had to be a full-service hotel — meaning that it could serve three meals a day. It has to have adequate meeting space.”
The NCAA requires team hotels to have a 24-hour kitchen and rooms that open up to an interior hallway — no motel-style rooms.
UALR re-evaluated the hotels when it was announced in 2006 that Alltel Arena would host a 2008 subregional. Two of the hotels on the initial list of six no longer met the criteria.
The La Quinta on Broadway had changed ownership and removed its full-service restaurant. The Holiday Inn by the Little Rock National Airport was planning a remodeling
“We’ve had as many as eight team hotels and as few as four,” Warlock said. “It’s nice if there’s one hotel per team, but it’s not a requirement in the first and second rounds.”
Warlock said that it is a requirement at the regional finals, where four teams are at each site.
Had their been six hotels or even eight, as the NCAA prefers, there might have been a disparity between the top hotel and the bottom hotel. Not necessarily a glaring difference in the quality of the hotels, but certainly in the distance teams have to travel and the availability of things to do around the hotel.
But the four team hotels that made the final cut are similar in quality — Travelocity. com rates all as three-star hotels — and the only factor separating them is proximity to Alltel Arena.
“In a situation where the hotels are pretty equally ranked, proximity is often a determining factor,” Warlock said.
The Wyndham is the closest, just fourth-tenths of a mile from the arena, while the Crown Plaza is the farthest from the arena — about 10. 2 miles from downtown North Little Rock.
Memphis Coach John Calipari said staying in the hotel closest to the arena has advantages and disadvantages.
“It’s a perk,” Calipari said. ” It also means that we’re going to have all the people right in our hotel. Tickets, family and everything, it’s a lot. You have coaches in the Final Four that want to get out of town because they don’t want to be a part of that. ”
Teams don’t have to stay in the hotel to which they are seeded.
If a team is uncomfortable with its situation, it can request a change. But, it’s not as easy as calling the NCAA and switching.
When a team wants to switch hotels, they have to first find another place to stay that’s better. Then they have to find someone to fill the 50 to 75 rooms that they are slotted to fill.
“Obviously, you can’t please everybody,” Warlock said. “Some would rather be on a bus as short as possible. Some want to be as far away as possible and get removed from everything. I’m sure we’re getting requests to change properties right now.”
Vanderbilt Coach Kevin Stallings, who has been to the tournament 15 times as either an assistant or head coach, said that he doesn’t think the location or quality of the hotel that a team stays in necessarily has an impact on the game, though teams that make the Final Four in San Antonio this year will spend as many as 15 nights in hotels. But, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t think he’d stayed in some stinkers.
“There’s some suspect places that you can be assigned to,” said Stallings, who will be going to Tampa, Fla., with the fourthseeded Commodores. “And we’ve been sent to some of those as both when I was a head coach and an assistant coach.”
Southern Illinois assistant coach Brad Korn told The Washington Post in an article published last March that in 2002, his 11 thseeded Salukis were put up in a hotel in Syracuse, N. Y., that was less than desirable.
The article described the hotel as having “moldy showers, unkempt beds and filthy curtains.” The hotel was sold in a bankruptcy auction several months later.
That’s clearly not the case in Arkansas.
“We met with the staff at each hotel and explained to them all the requirements and what all it entailed,” Warlock said. “I’ve personally stayed at both the Peabody and the Crown Plaza and I can tell you that they are both nice, nice hotels.”
Warlock said that while hotels are just one part of the total experience in Little Rock, the NCAA wants new sites to have a successful first hosting.
He also admits to having a more than casual interest in this subregional. Warlock was the sports information director at Henderson State University before moving to the NCAA several years ago.
“I take a little pride in it, because although I am not a native Arkansan — I call it home,” Warlock said. “I’d be down there, but they knew that I wouldn’t get any work done if I was there. So they sent me to Anaheim [Calif. ], instead.”
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
