Raleigh, NC State prioritize men’s basketball in short, two-year NCAA bidding window

For the past couple years, the Triangle has aggressively pursued bigger and bigger NCAA championships, with College Cups practically joining the Division II College World Series as annual events.

That seemed to open the door to aim higher: A women’s basketball regional, the Frozen Four, volleyball, wrestling. In the two-year cycle coming up, with bids due last week for NCAA events in the 2026-27 and 2027-28 academic years, the Greater Raleigh Sports Alliance passed on all of that.

The 20 bids submitted were all for events Raleigh and Cary have hosted in the past — men’s basketball, College Cups, the Division II CWS, golf, gymnastics. Even women’s lacrosse, a success last year at WakeMed Soccer Park and scheduled to return this year, was left off the list because it falls too close on the calendar to The Soccer Tournament, which has emerged as a higher priority.

It was not because of a lack of ambition.

“The total number of bids doesn’t matter as much as submitting the right bids for the right events and the events that are good fits for this market and our venues in terms of timing and facilities,” GRSA executive director Scott Dupree said. “We’ve tried to make sound, responsible decisions. I know that we’ve done that. There are a lot of factors involved in every bid cycle.”

It has been a fruitful relationship with the NCAA, especially after the GRSA and Town of Cary combined to host the entire men’s and women’s soccer tournaments in North Carolina in the spring of 2021, and twice — in 2016 and 2024 — stepping in to bail out other cities with stadium issues on short notice.

The GRSA and N.C. State have long talked about bringing a women’s basketball regional to PNC Arena. The success of the Carolina Hurricanes’ outdoor game last year, and the massive crowd that came out the next day to watch N.C. State and UNC’s club hockey teams, suggested that the time might be ripe to go after the Frozen Four. There were talks about trying to bring the volleyball and wrestling championships to PNC, two fast-growing sports that feel like the next wave.

But there was a combination of circumstances that led the GRSA and its partners, primarily N.C. State and Cary but also UNC, Peace and Mt. Olive, to submit a more modest bid package, and the very short bid cycle was a big part of that. The NCAA typically bids these championships out — the men’s and women’s Final Fours have a separate competition – on four-year cycles. But new NCAA president Charlie Baker wanted to reassess the bidding process after taking over, so what was previously announced as a four-year cycle was cut to two.

For Raleigh, that narrow two-year window meant taking fewer chances on events like the wrestling championships, which overlap with the first weekend of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. After losing the chance to host men’s first and second rounds in 2021 because of the one-site COVID tournament, Dupree said the bidding group didn’t want to leave any doubt with the NCAA about its top priority.

“I’m pretty confident we would sell out (wrestling) and make it a successful event,” Dupree said. “I just think it creates potential complications. We decided to focus on men’s basketball. I know we’ll look at wrestling again next time.”

In the future, on a four-year cycle, it would be easier to pursue wrestling and basketball simultaneously, since PNC would likely only get men’s basketball in one of those four years. The GRSA and N.C. State also bid for a men’s basketball regional, as they have in the past without success.

Volleyball is a different story. There was a real appetite to pursue that championship, held this season in Tampa, but the early December timing didn’t work for PNC Arena, which is already trying to cram the Hurricanes, N.C. State basketball and Disney on Ice into that window.

The Hurricanes also wanted to pause pursuit of a Frozen Four, in part because the $300 million renovations to PNC are scheduled to be complete by 2028, when the next cycle begins, and in part to do more due diligence on their hosting responsibilities. Typically, in non-college hockey markets, the host NHL team shares that duty with a hockey-sponsoring university. Minnesota was the “host” school in Tampa this spring.

“It’s something we’d really like to do in the future,” Hurricanes president and general manager Don Waddell said. “The timing isn’t right now.”

Due diligence was also the reason for not pursuing a women’s basketball regional. That format changed last season from the usual four teams at four different sites to two sites each hosting eight teams, with four straight days of games. Last year, the host sites were Seattle and Greenville, S.C. Dupree said the bidding group wanted to get a better sense of how the new format operates before putting in a bid.

The good news is that the next chance to bid on all these events is only two years away, and this cycle’s more modest package of bids is no indication that there won’t be a more aggressive push next time around.

There also will be new opportunities in the next cycle. The potential expansion of the rowing center at Lake Wheeler — which has become the regular host of the ACC rowing championships — could open the door to NCAA championships there. Cary is interested in bidding for the men’s and women’s tennis championships once renovations to Cary Tennis Park are complete.

There’s also still hope that the NCAA will further codify its relationship with Cary and make USA Baseball’s training complex the permanent home of Division II baseball, as Omaha is for Division I, as well as making WakeMed an anchor site for the College Cup, hosting the men or women — or both — every fall.

That would certainly simplify things in the next bid cycle, when Dupree said the bidding partners are likely to take a more aggressive approach anyway.

“I can’t say it for certain, but I can say it with a good deal of confidence,” Dupree said. “A lot of these decisions would have been made differently in a four-year window. That would have given us, in a big-picture kind of way, a lot more flexibility, a lot more options. In a four-year window, our final bid package would look different. I couldn’t tell you exactly how, but different.”

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