This night, the NCAA Division I males’s basketball event begins with a doubleheader within the heartland of the nation, Dayton, Ohio. For a lot of the final decade, these “First 4” video games have been held to chop down the lads’s discipline of 68 groups to 64.
This yr, the ladies’s Division I event can even have a beginning discipline of 68 groups. Nevertheless, the eight groups taking part in in these First 4 video games might be taking part in in Raleigh, N.C., Baton Rouge, La., Ames, Iowa, and Columbia, S.C.
The video games are a pigtail extension of the campus websites which are used for the Spherical of 64 and the Spherical of 32 video games within the girls’s event.
And I’ll be frank: will probably be an absolute miracle if any of the eight colleges — Incarnate Phrase, Howard, DePaul, Dayton, Longwood, Mount St. Mary’s, Florida State, and Missouri State — make it into the second week of play. It’s going to require successful three video games in 5 days on the highway.
Nonetheless, with UCLA’s males having made it out of final yr’s First 4 to get to final yr’s nationwide semifinals, it’s maybe time to contemplate the potential for a First 4 workforce from the ladies’s aspect making a deep run.
And I believe one strategy to make issues extra equal between the lads and the ladies is to have one web site for the 2 First 4 doubleheaders.
Listed here are my prime 5 decisions for websites for these video games:
5. Tampa, Fla. — What? Tampa a basketball city? Properly, there have been many makes an attempt to create a profitable professional males’s workforce within the metropolis, and the Toronto Raptors performed a very good a part of the 2021-22 season at Tampa’s Amelie Area. As well as, plenty of the higher prep women’ gamers play simply up the coast at IMG Academy.
4. San Francisco, Calif. — Once you have a look at the highest recruiting lessons for this season, 4 out of the highest 5 have been on the West Coast (UCLA, Stanford, Oregon, Oregon State). San Francisco has a pleasant, new skilled enviornment that may be a gem of a vacation spot for the First 4.
3. Nashville, Tenn. — The unique “capital of the New South,” there’s nice help for ladies’s basketball within the area, with loads of women and younger girls following the likes of Kentucky, Louisville, Tennessee, and different school packages.
2. Indianapolis, Ind. — The house of NCAA headquarters can be a logical jumpoff level for the ladies’s event. Certainly, the “bubble” that was necessitated final yr for the lads’s basketball event confirmed that plenty of locales within the metropolis, resembling Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse and Indiana Farmers Coliseum for IUPUI might host an NCAA Match sport.
1. Springfield, Mass. — It might be acceptable to start out the Street to the Remaining 4 at an enviornment within the metropolis the place the Naismith Basketball Corridor of Fame is situated. Too, Springfield is 23 miles south of Smith School, a girls’s school which influenced the event and elegance of ladies’s basketball for many years because of the work of Senda Berenson, a member of the Corridor of Fame.
