CAA Basketball Tournament Set for Move to Charleston in 2017

The CAA is expected to announce that its men’s basketball tournament will be played in the North Charleston Colosseum in 2017, 2018, and 2019. The league is in the final year of a three year arrangement to play the tournament in Baltimore. Prior to being held in the 11,200 seat Royal Farms Arena i Baltimore, the city of Richmond, Virginia played host to the CAA tourney from 1990-2013.

Predictably, not everyone is happy with the announcement. Charleston, South Carolina is a long way from the Northern CAA schools. It’s definitely not an easy trip from Northeastern, Hofstra, or even Delaware and Drexel. It’s a much longer haul for the NoVA-centric alumni bases of JMU and William & Mary as well. But moving to Charleston is worth a shot.

It would be unfair to say that the move from Richmond to Baltimore has been a failure. It has not. But as someone who’s attended each tourney in Baltimore, I can assure you that it definitely wasn’t the hottest ticket in town. The first year a huge portion of the tickets were dumped on the market in the form of a Groupon deal. Both years, I’ve been able to walk up 30 minutes before tip off and score lower level center of the court seats for sub 30 bucks. There just wasn’t much buzz and the arena was never close to full. So yeah, it wasn’t a failure, but it wasn’t such an overwhelming success that it makes moving it to a new city particularly risky. They’re not giving away a golden goose by leaving Maryland.

Attendance might drop due to Charleston’s distance from some CAA schools. Charleston is a heck of a city though, and a nice enough city on its own that it might attract some new fans to the tourney though. If UNCW and CofC are in the hunt, expect fans of each to pack the arena the way JMU filled up the Richmond Coliseum in 2013. The reality is that the CAA used to be a Virginia-centric league that made Richmond a good host. Once the league lost VCU, ODU, and George Mason however, it went from a centralized “bus friendly” league to a huge one requiring air travel for most road trips. The league hoped that by moving the tourney to a centralized location in Baltimore that it would help fill up the arena. It didn’t, so they’re trying something new. There’s really no reason not to.