(03-14-2018 02:55 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  What locations would be better for more of the schools?

Some where east of UAB, UMT, or WKY,

(03-13-2018 04:21 PM)blazerjay Wrote:  

(03-10-2018 05:27 PM)MGNation Wrote:  https://meangreennation.com/final-though...ournament/

Four days is enough to get a good feel for everything. Here are more detailed thoughts after about 100 conversations about it with various folks.

I guess you didn't run into me. Here are my thoughts after a week in Frisco. Overall, I had a pleasant experience, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

Food & Shopping: While there are few options near the arena, if this tournament were to ever have a FULL house for the event, the limited number of restaraunts within walking distance would be woefully inadequate. Most of those restaraunts seemed surprised there was a tournament in the building (outside of the two sponsoring establishments). For example, the Subway was staffed by 1 person at lunchtime.

Hotels & Parking
The Hotels convenient to the site are expensive. Even the mentioned Holiday Inn Express was more per night than the full service Holiday Inn twenty minutes away in Garland. Let me add, those are 20 minutes of white knuckle stock car drafting on the tollways.

The free parking was a big positive. However you must have been in the blue lot if you were having to search for a space. The Silver lot was always less than 2/3's full, even on the day NTX, MTSU and WKU were all playing.

Ford Center & Views
One issue. Train your event staff. I can't stress this enough. Having people that check your tickets and deny access to the seating area you have a ticket for is inexcusible.

The bleacher seating was a joke. The institutional ticket (bench side) bleachers rise was so slight, you had to sit near the top to see the entire court. The view lower third of the bleachers was obstructed by anyone standing on the sidelines. The "rows" were actually comprised of individual plastic folding chairs zip-tied together.

The "expensive" ticket side was even worse. The rise of the bleachers was more standard, but the seating was simple wooden bleachers with out backs. Those would be bad enough for only one game, imagine having to deal with that for entire days of basketball, after forking over alot to purchase them.

One thing you didn't mention---The curtain. The curtain did curtail alot of noise from the other court, but definitely not all of it. I did see one player react to a whistle from the other court, but it did not affect play. One major issue, pep bands with electric guitars. The standard bands could definitely be heard from the opposite court, but those few with electic guitars vibrated the building from end to end. If this set up is to continue, electric assisted instruments need to be excluded. It was neet to be able to sit in the football seats at the end of the curtain and watch both games at once, though it was similar to watching a tennis match from the sidelines.

The video boards defintely need to be raised. They also must have smaller stat boards in the opposite corners of the court. Having the PA announcer announce how many team fouls and timeouts remaining reminded me of a church league. Also, would it be too difficult to announce the score from the other court periodically?

And for Conference named USA, I only heard the national athem once...before the women's championship game.

Spectacle

The "fun" stuff out front was a nice touch. Too bad there weren't many attending that were of the age group in attendance that those activities were targeting. I was disappointed I didn't see Judy lined up at the "50" in her battery powered Jeep. FWIW, I did see her rushing out of Raising Cane's after her daily free box lunch. (Oh yeah, I forgot you got a free box lunch with every single session ticket purchased at the ticket window)

The tournament was a much of a success as it could be or ever will be until this conference takes basketball seriously. The attendees we basically only the true hard core fans of the visiting schools, fans and curious folks from UNT and elementary school kids they bused in to pump up attendance numbers (Bham got raked over the coals for that, funny that in Frisco it went un-noticed).

If this is the best C-USA can do, perhaps it is time to move the early rounds to campus sites. If those first two rounds even drew as little as 2,000 avg.on campuses, the total numbers of tickets sold would dwarf the numbers at this year's single site tournament.

Also, with the two court set-up you're paying to watch every game, but only seeing half of them.