The two teams that advance from the regional based in Spokane, Washington, will trek more than 2,800 miles diagonally across the United States to the Final Four site in Tampa, Florida. The other two will be in the air barely longer than an hour on their trip from Birmingham, Alabama.
The NCAA moved from four regional sites to two “super regional” locations for the women’s tournament in 2023 to generate more interest and revenue. In all three seasons, the locations were in the Pacific Northwest and dotted near the East Coast. It has created host deserts at a moment when fans are more likely than ever to attend a women’s basketball game.
“I don’t mind going out west if there’s also an option for people to go see a game,” said UConn head coach Geno Auriemma, whose team will fly cross country to the Elite Eight for a third straight season. “If you live anywhere from New York to St. Louis, how do you get to a game? I don’t understand it. I’ve never been a big fan of just two places.”
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The change to the format was announced in 2019, an entire era ago in women’s basketball. The sport has exploded in popularity since then with household names that rival the men’s game. Sellouts and rising postseason prices are becoming the norm. But the NCAA is locked into the two-site system until at least 2028.
“I think that women’s basketball, sometimes we make decisions, making them for two, three and four years out, then we’re not in that same place,” said Tara VanDerveer, the retired Stanford head coach, in her final tournament last March.
Will the NCAA move away from the super regional format for the women’s basketball tournament in the future? (Matthew Holst/Getty Images)
(Matthew Holst via Getty Images)
Coaches and players have said the structure reminds them of AAU tournaments, with teams milling about arenas and passing in hallways. Not all are immediate competitors since there are two separate regional brackets in one spot. NCAA personnel have dubbed them “kind of like mini-Final Fours,” part of the reasoning behind the creation.
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“The super regional format could really proliferate and enhance [the] competitive environment by consolidating the competition,” said Gina Antoniello, a sport culture expert and assistant professor at NYU’s Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport, to Yahoo Sports. “I think the tournament is trying to create an environment of these intense matchups and drawing interest.”
But the way the format is currently carried out can create an unfair competitive balance, negatively impact potential fan participation and put a strain on smaller host cities that are traditional women’s basketball hotbeds.
March travel madness
The March Madness format will always feature tough travel for certain teams, as was the case with four regional sites. But with just two sites, it’s more difficult for a larger number of teams.
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There’s also a complication of time. The women’s tournament concludes the Elite Eight on Sunday and Monday and then has a quick turnaround to the Final Four games on Friday. One team from each regional will have one fewer day between games. (It amounts to three days of rest at minimum, compared to the men’s tournament where they have five days before the Final Four starts on Saturday, April 5.)
Two years ago, the Dallas Final Four provided a more centralized final landing spot for teams traveling from Seattle (2,000 miles) and Greenville, South Carolina (920). A year ago, the winners out of Portland had to fly 2,500 miles to Cleveland whereas the Albany, New York, regional winners could have driven the 500 miles in slightly more time than the others’ plane ride.
The 2019 tournament was also played in Portland, Oregon, and Albany (the Final Four was in Tampa), but there were also sites in Chicago and Greensboro, North Carolina.
In 2026, the regionals will be held in Fort Worth, Texas, and Sacramento, California, with the Final Four in Phoenix, leaving fans in the eastern part of the country with a hefty travel toll. In 2027, it’s back to opposite ends with Philadelphia and Las Vegas funneling to a Final Four in Columbus, Ohio. And in 2028, sites in Portland and Washington, D.C., will converge in Indianapolis.
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The strain of booming business
Albany is no stranger to hosting women’s basketball regionals with heavy fan interest. For years, it has held a regional featuring UConn in what coaches often called out as more of a home base than a supposed neutral site. It regularly drew 10,000.
The 2024 regional was different. By happenstance of the bracket, Albany drew the biggest names and programs in the country, featuring Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, LSU’s Angel Reese, South Carolina’s Dawn Staley and her squad, and a star-studded cast from UCLA. Every ticket sold out while the arena and city, skilled in hosting four teams, bulged with eight teams plus traveling fans.
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The Portland regional, which featured UConn and USC’s JuJu Watkins as the main draws, did not sell out. Antoniello told Yahoo Sports that dichotomy could be why the NCAA is giving the format a long trial run to see what works rather than making rash decisions.
“I don’t think it’s a one-year thing or a two-year thing or a three-year thing,” Antoniello said. “I think you need a little bit of longevity to see if one year is an outlier or you have this trending upward in those key metrics.
“In this case, saying one is more enhanced than the other is yet to be seen.”
Coaches critiqued the lack of quality hotels in Albany, an issue that came up against last week when Auriemma voiced his displeasure that first-round opponent Arkansas State stayed at a hotel 45 minutes from UConn’s campus. He felt they missed out on a true NCAA tournament experience in their first trip to the Big Dance, which he values.
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“It’s not easy to find equitable accommodations for all eight teams, unless you are going to Chicago, New York, a big city like that,” Auriemma said.
But smaller spots such as Albany, Birmingham, Greenville and Bridgeport, Connecticut, are rich in women’s basketball fandom, or near enough to a powerhouse to pull outsized interest. It will be a balancing act for the NCAA committee deciding how it wants to move forward to best support the growth of the game.
