User review: ACC Women Basketball Tournament
by SouthernFriedInfidel | Published on March 8th, 2010, 8:16 am | Sports
I know that many people dismiss women as valid basketball players, but those people are -- uninformed. Befor I review my experiences with the ACC Tournament, I'll just suggest that if you enjoy watching basketball, plan next year to visit your favorite college's women for a home game some time. It's easy to get tickets at the door and costs around $10-12 per seat. And definitely worth it. Personally, I find it astounding that the ACC has not attracted more fans who find it worthwhile to come to Greensboro and spend 4 nights watching some great games and support their favorite schools.Anyway -- for the 7th year in a row, I attended the ACC tournament here in Greensboro over the weekend. As always, I found that the games were almost all exciting. The teamwork and skill exhibited by all the teams was fun to watch, and of course, being Duke fans, my wife and I were very pleased with the ultimate outcome. Regarding the stage that was set by the ACC and the Coliseum, I have the following observations:
Parking: $8 per day. Now, I can understand such a charge for the first 2 days, when you have 3 sessions (more on that presently) per day and many folks leaving and returning as they get meals between sessions. Being able to pass in and out on the same ticket made the charge at least seem OK. But really -- one Saturday and Sunday, with 1 session each day, that $8 became quite a rip-off. And then there were the poor folks attending the high school tournament at the same time in the convention floors. They must have felt ripped off pretty thoroughly. At any rate, the parking arrangements were extremely convoluted (cars in one section, buses in the next, then cars, then buses -- traffic cones were EVERYWHERE), but the parking personnel appeared to have pretty decent training and directed people to the correct zones with little trouble. As always, the parking places need to be redrawn to allow today's SUVs sufficient room to park side by side.
Fanfest: Before the start of each session, the Pavilion was opened for this Fanfest thing. In past years, this was something to really look forward to: sort of a block party for some and a showcase for the schools to each tell the fans some interesting facts about their programs and histories. For the past few years, it has devolved into a baby-sitting service, with a few activities for little kids and a couple of booths for advertisers to give away cheap swag. There hasn't been anything to engage the interest of a FAN for years. I have to wonder what happens there for the men's tourney. My guess is that the advertisers work harder to get attention, but I wonder if the ACC suddenly takes interest in putting any interesting stuff out for fans. And if they do -- why do they treat the women's fans differently?
Entry: The Coliseum staff were friendly and helpful at all the times I encountered them. The electronic ticket scanning mechanisms seemed to be very reliable, and they always moved the crowd into the arena very efficiently. Kudos to them.
The Concourse: It has been renovated all around with new, bright surroundings for the food venues. The selections of food has been upgraded slightly, and it was good to see a couple of places offering salads, rather than simply the standard fast-food crap. Oh the fast food is still there, of course, but having access to salads and fruit cups makes life on a diet a bit more bearable.
The Arena: On the first session of the first two days, there was general admission for the main crowd, with sections blocked off for school groups. Ad a result, my wife and I got very nice seats near center court for those games, then moved to our assigned seats for all the other games. Interestingly, the seats at center court appeared to have something like 2-3 inches more space per person (in both width and depth) than the seats we were assigned to, along the baseline of the court. It's really a shame that the place was designed with this disparity between center court and the end zones. When the place is sold out, you are forced to get intimate with your seat mates. It pays to be skinny, fer shure.
Non-game entertainment: In the past, they used to have Chik-fil-a send a small blimp with a cow on it around the arena in the media timeouts to drop parachute-equipped toy cows on the crowd. Last year, Chik-fil-a lost interest in the stunt, and there was nothing to fly around the arena. This year, they decided to go with "Air ACC" -- a huge floating sneaker.
The stuff they dropped from it was ... disappointing. They cycled through the same stuff every session: RBC Centura dropped "million-dollar bills" with flower seeds embedded in them. Food Lion dropped coupons for free boxes of cereal. Pepsi dropped coupons for free Sierra Mist t-shirts. Geico dropped little stuffed geckos. And the Rush dropped tine foam-rubber barbells and coupons for free sessions of exercise. One lady caught a coupn near us for the free cereal, then immediately passed it to her neighbor. The neighbor passed it on... it just kept going down the line, because no one cared.
One interesting innovation they had was a t-shirt Gatling gun. The thing was set up with a magazine of maybe 15 t-shirts and a pretty powerful air blower. When activated, it would spray the crowd with rapid-fire white "slugs" of wrapped t-shirts. For some mysterious reason, the cannon was only fired at one section of the crowd all through the tournament. If you sat in sections 115-130, you were constantly getting chances to get free shirts. If not, you were out of luck.
Openings: I hope that no normal person enjoys the usual opening of festivities with the performing of the national anthem. But honestly, it seems that the ACC went out of its way to make things bad for the crowd. One session opened with a SAXOPHONE player, fer cryin' out loud.
Half-time: Once again, half-times were dominated with dogs. Dogs chasing frisbees. Got the kids interested, but oh well. There was also the standard visit from the Bouncing Bulldogs. They were as always good at their rope tricks. But after all these years, they held little interest for me. There was one half-time with a unicycle group from Asheville, and some guy who did juggling while on his own unicycle -- pretty cool stuff. For several years, the final game's half-time was the hope of some trampoline basketball dunking group. Happily, the tournament arranged to get something new -- BMX stunt bicyclists. Overall, it was a pretty neat set of acts.
By and large, the tournament presentation was better than in prior years. It's just a shame, as I said before, that more people don't come out to see it.
