Get the State Tourney Moving!

According to the Times' indispensable Craig Smith, the WIAA is thinking about moving the state 3A basketball tournaments back to Tacoma, after attendance the past two years in Seattle wasn't what they'd hoped.

If they want attendance to grow, this is a mistake. You have to build an audience in the city you are in, you can't just move it to a place for two years, then give up on it.

If the WIAA is going to move the thing around, they ought to really commit to it, and have the basketball tournaments travel around the state, just like the NCAA Final Four travels around the country.

Thanks to the profusion of new arenas in our state, there are plenty of places to do it.

With the opening of Everett Events Center in 2003, seven Washington cities could now conceivably host a state basketball tournament:

The Toyota Center in Tri-Cities, which opened in 1988, seats 6,147 for basketball.
Yakima SunDome (1990) seats 6,097 for basketball.
Gonzaga U's McCarthey Athletic Center (2004) seats 6,000 for basketball. (There's also the Spokane Events Center, which has been open since 1995).
Comcast Arena at Everett Events Center (2003) seats 9150 for basketball.

And of course Tacoma has the Tacoma Dome, and Seattle could host games in Hec Ed, Key Arena, or whatever facility Seattle U ends up building for their D1 program. (Pullman could host games at Friel Court, but with a population barely above 20,000, I'm not sure they'd be able to draw a big enough crowd.)

Seven is more than enough. The NCAA has shifted their tournament around between Atlanta, Indianapolis, and San Antonio--one of those cities has hosted eight of the past twelve Final Fours.

I think it would be fun for (condescension alert) smaller cities to get a statewide event, and instructive for high school kids to get the experience of going to different parts of the state. God knows when I went to Garfield it would've been good to get out and see the world as it exists away from coffee shops, high-end clothing stores, and people who read the Weekly.

One obstacle is that the WIAA currently insists on having the girls' and boys' tourneys both in the same city--so they need two courts, which pretty much limits them to Seattle, Tacoma or Spokane. It makes sense, they don't want them to be different places in case one school has a team in both tournaments, and that school's fans had to pick between teams.

Oregon's found a way around this problem. Down in the Beaver State (?) they hold the 4A boys tourney one weekend, the 4A girls the next. Easy as pie.

Ok, that is all about high school basketball today. Maybe.