Ncaa Spikers May Have Found Promised Land

As long as the AFC must be represented in the Super Bowl and Tiger Woods can win the Masters by 37 strokes, semifinal Saturday at college basketball’s Final Four remains the best afternoon in sport.

Semifinal Thursday at the NCAA Volleyball Championships don’t call it the Final Four unless you have a good lawyer doesn’t have quite the same feel. And that’s not all bad.

No domed stadia. No Billy Packer. We could go on.

But, yes, some of the electricity at the Spokane Arena on Thursday night was static, for any number of reasons. Primary among them: the traveling fan base for the four teams is minimal, and the distance from home great. Florida did send its band, cheerleaders and Alberta the Alligator. Stanford sent its band, cheerleaders and The Tree, bless its trunk.

Penn State, however, was represented only by its lion proving again that not only can you not get to Happy Valley, but you can’t get out, either.

Mostly, though, volleyball is a different animal than basketball and a puppy at that. The NCAA has only thrown 17 of these soirees, and so is constantly rewriting the how-to manual.

To say nothing of the where-to manual. And if Spokane is not necessarily Shangri-La, it has at least made the A list for events like this.

“It’s important for us that the people in town know the championship is here that it’s a big deal,” said Donna Noonan, the NCAA’s director of championships for this event. “There aren’t many places in the country where we’re on the front page of the newspaper. Spokane is the right-sized community for this type of championship.”

The perfect size? Any place the matches will sell out, of course.

Kevin Twohig got the hint a year ago when he attended the finals in Cleveland.

“I’ll never forget standing next to Donna at the scorer’s table,” said the general manager of the Arena, “and having her look up after the match started and see her shake her head and say, ‘It should be full.’

“It was a pretty clear message.”

If selling 10,284 tickets Thursday came up short of the grail, it was still sensational. If they all come back with 900 friends on Saturday, it’ll be the best-attended volleyball final in NCAA history - and a tribute to the grassroots marketing effort spearheaded by the Arena’s Amy Brown.

How remarkable is that? UCLA - the Cooperstown of volleyball - has hosted the championships three times. All three times, the Bruins made the final game. And none of the three drew more than 7,177 to Pauley Pavilion.

As recently as five years go, fewer than 5,000 saw the title game in Albuquerque.

“A sellout is just good for the atmosphere,” said Noonan. “These are the best players in the college game and they deserve a full house. Whether the arena seats 10,000 or 12,000, there’s an electricity there.

“And when you have a tough ticket, it lends credibility to your event. It’s like, ‘Wow - this is worth going to.”’

And anything worth going to is worth watching on TV - but not necessarily a day later.

If you surf the channels tonight after TGIF, you may come across the Stanford-Long Beach State semifinal on ESPN2, a mere 24 hours old. It was tape delayed because, well, TV has a problem with volleyball.

The programmers never know how long it will run.

This never seems to be a problem with the Oscars, but then Meryl Streep has a certain celebrity appeal that Kristin Folkl, at the moment, does not.

It’s an issue the American Volleyball Coaches Association began to tackle at its annual meeting here this week. One proposal being kicked around is a timed match, using rally scoring - now only employed in fifth-game tiebreakers, with points counted on every exchange.

This is radical stuff, like the designated hitter and the 3-point line.

“Two hours seems to be the magic number,” said Noonan, “for being on live TV. And I’d love to see all three matches on live instead of tape-delaying the semifinals.

“But even more than TV, the average American’s attention span seems to be about that long. I use movies as an analogy. I love movies, but after about an hour and a half, unless it’s a blockbuster, I’m looking at my watch wondering when this is going to be over.”

As it is, only Saturday’s final match goes out live over the air - it being easier to play with a time slot on a Saturday afternoon than during prime time. Solving that problem might allow volleybosses to consider another tweak - to a Saturday-Monday schedule, something which contributes to the high-energy atmosphere of the Final Four.

Noonan is skeptical, but open.

“I don’t know if we want to be any closer to Christmas than we already are,” she said. “We’ve never talked about that. If it was a week earlier, it might work. But people already have 20 million things to do now.

“But it’s something to talk about.”

And giving people something to talk about would seem to be the point.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.

This sidebar appeared with the story: NCAA ONLINE Track the NCAA Tournament through the semifinals and finals in Spokane by browsing Virtually Northwest. You’ll find tourney brackets and related stories and photos at www.virtuallynw.com

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