On second thought, make it 2010

For the basketball fan fretting that his ticket budget might not stretch through three consecutive years of NCAA events booked at the Spokane Arena starting next spring, there was a bit of a reprieve Wednesday.

There’s now an extra year to save up for the last one.

Without actually acknowledging it was revising an announcement it made last week, the NCAA revealed in an on-line release that Spokane and Washington State University have now been awarded men’s basketball first- and second-round tournament games in 2010, not 2009.

Spokane had been announced as one of the 2009 tournament sites last Thursday. Instead, it will host the 2010 first and second rounds on March 18 and 20, essentially switching dates with Boise, which originally had been granted the 2010 games.

“They contacted us (Tuesday) morning wondering if we could change because of some scheduling issues,” said John David Wicker, WSU’s assistant director of athletics.

One of those issues involved Spokane, which is already set to host the 2007 first and second rounds of the men’s tournament and the 2008 West Regional of the women’s tournament.

“That was part of it,” Wicker admitted. “They have to work not only with the men’s tournament, but the women’s to make sure sites don’t conflict and us having events three straight years was probably something they didn’t want to do. There were also some other factors they didn’t go into, but we were completely agreeable to what they wanted to do.”

Kevin Twohig, executive director of the Spokane Public Facilities District, said WSU contacted him this week to see if 2010 dates were available and that he agreed to the change without hesitation.

“We try to make dates available to the NCAA whenever we can,” said Twohig, though he noted he still hadn’t received any official confirmation of the change – which the NCAA apparently confined to simply reposting last week’s original announcement with the dates revised on its Web site.

“That’s bold,” Twohig laughed.

But when it comes to Spokane and the NCAAs, “it’s always something.”

In 2003, he pointed out, the NCAA assigned Brigham Young to play in Spokane – which, had the Cougars advanced to the Elite Eight, would have required them to play on a Sunday, against the school’s Mormon doctrine. The upcoming 2007 games were originally scheduled to be on March 15 and 17 (Thursday-Saturday), but were changed to March 16-18 to accommodate CBS.

“CBS likes to have one site in the Mountain time zone and one on the West Coast,” Wicker said, “so they can do games from both sites on Thursday. When they realized the other western first-round site was Sacramento and we’re both in the Pacific time zone, it didn’t work well for CBS’ TV blocks, so they asked us to change to Friday-Saturday.

“It’s just not an NCAA event in Spokane without something like this happening,” he said.

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