2009 NCCS Regional and National Basketball

Basketball season is upon us and I wanted to make you aware of some of the new developments in the NCCS Basketball Regional and National Tournaments this year. I'll try to lay out how basketball will happen this year as we incorporate a Championship Format and push forward with standardization.

First of all, most of you are aware that the National Championship will be played at the NCAA Final Four site in Detroit, Michigan . Our intramural sports teams must qualify for the National Tournament by winning one of eight regional tournaments held throughout the country. For a list of those regional tournaments, go to http://www.nirsa.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Sports/Basketball/basketball.htm on the NIRSA web page.

Each of these eight regional tournaments is an open tournament, meaning any of our intramural teams can sign up and compete. They don't have to be our campus champions. ANY team that meets our eligibility criteria can enter and play. The cost to enter each of these tournaments is set at $300. Each of these eight tournaments will send a men's team and a women's team to the national tournament.

Each qualifying team will receive a $3000 stipend to cover costs of hotel, travel, and other expenses (except for the four closest teams from Miami and Western Michigan -- which will receive $2500 each) . Since hotel reservations for teams needed to be made in advance, the NNC has committed part of this $3000 to each qualifying team's hotel expense. One less thing for teams to worry about, right? The remaining balance of their stipend can be used for travel, food or other expenses incurred.

The regional tournament directors will determine which teams advance. Of course, winning teams will be offered the first right of refusal to attend. If the winning team can not attend, the regional tournament director will offer the "bid" to the runners-up. We will have 16 teams present at our championship, each of which will have qualified through competition.

POWERade is the title sponsor of our national basketball program. They were instrumental in getting the NCCS access to the Final Four and have accepted a substanital financial burden to make it happen. Additional partners in this event include Champion, who will be providing apparel for teams and staff at the national tournament. CBS College Sports will be televising parts of the men's and women's tournaments, and will televise, in their entirety, the championship games for each division. These games will be televised live nationally on CBS College Sports. These partners provide significant enhancement to the student experience and provide substantial value to our regional and national tournaments.

Now, I know the current economic environment is pretty dismal. But, because of our business partners and thier support of our championship format, we are in a very good position to continue to provide a very high quality experience at our National Basketball Tournament. Our students should see enhanced quality and access. To provide that, in these times, is pretty darn good.

So, please do what you can to (1) inform your intramural teams about the opportunities at your region's NCCS tournament(s), and (2) support your intramural teams if they show interest in attending.

Moving forward on Standardization

Hello all, thank you for your patience as I worked through some "technical" issues with the blog. This series of blog topics will focus on the two newest of the NCCS charges.

Those charges are:

• (1) creating and implementing a self-sustaining funding model for basketball and flag football regional and national championships, and


• (2) standardizing, to the extent possible, our regional tournaments in basketball and flag football.

Whether or not you have noticed, the NCCS has actually tried to make progress in that regard this year. In flag football regionals, we tried to use a decentralized approach to financially support the national tournament. In this model, which had mixed success, regional hosts were asked to provide entry fees for winning teams ($400/team), travel stipends for officials (4 @ $150) and cover the cost of their insurance. The cost of these expenses to the regional host could have been as high as about $3000, depending on the number of divisions that actually occurred at their tournament. Multiplying that by 8 regionals comes to $24,000, which is a decent percentage of what it costs to run the tournament. Due to a number of factors, we didn't actually generate that much revenue. Regional hosts did receive the $2000 NIRSA stipend (minus insurance) and the $1000 POWERade stipend, for a total of $3000 of financial support from the NSC/NNC. Fees were not standardized. Each regional tournament set their own entry fees.

Now, in basketball, we are attempting to do the same thing through a centralized model. In this model, fees are standardized at $300 for every regional tournament. Of that $300, $90 of it flows back to the NSC to financially support the national tournament. That's it. In theory, it relieves the host's burden of having to deal with regional travel stipends, regional officials and their stipends, entry fees and so forth. It simplifies the process. Critics might say it takes away the professional development aspects of running a tournament like this. That might be true, but the host still has to do everything they did before, including developing a budget (to run on $210/team, plus the NSC and POWERade stipends), recruiting teams, finding local sponsorship, all of the operational elements of the tournament; I could go on and on. In the end, a centralized approach seems to be more efficient administratively, with less financial risk, for the host institution.

The other difference between basketball and flag football this year is that in basketball, we employed a championship format. Championship format means that the only way a team gets to play in the National Championship is by winning a regional championship. Teams must participate in and win a regional championship to advance to the national. Flag football employed open regional tournaments and an open national tournament. What difference does this make? Well, financially, it makes it much easier to determine expenditures and staffing levels if you know the number of teams you are going to have. From a budgetary perspective, championship format makes life easier.

Let me know which model -- centralized or decentralized -- you would prefer. And, of course, let me know why you feel one is more appropriate than the other.