The Atlantic 10 released a statement Thursday morning regarding the location of its championship tournament, which was originally scheduled to take place at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
The tournament will be held in Richmond, Va. at Richmond’s Robins Center and Virginia Commonwealth’s Siegel Center.
A-10 Commissioner Bernadette McGlade alluded to the time it takes for arena staff to transition from one game to the next, especially with back-to-back games. Add along the necessary COVID-19 precautions and that time is a lot more difficult to manage in just one facility.
This led to McGlade and the rest of the selection committee — which includes other A-10 athletic directors and McGlade’s staff — to look into the option of having two venues host the tournament.
“It really started to become apparent that if both [Richmond and VCU] were willing to share co-hosting duties then we might have a really great opportunity to do something very unique,” McGlade said. “It was a pretty big driving factor that took us down that road.”
The two arenas are 6.3 miles away from one another and less than a 20-minute drive apart, making travel in between the two facilities a non-factor.
Six total schools including Dayton, George Mason, Duquesne and Saint Louis submitted applications to host the tournament before Richmond-VCU was chosen as the final destination.
Approximately 250-300 fans will be allowed in most venues, though most tickets will be allotted to family and friends of the student-athletes. It has yet to have been decided by the NCAA how many additional tickets will be allotted to fans.
Seeding for the tournament is another aspect that has yet to be decided, but should be set in stone by next Thursday when the A-10 committee holds its weekly meeting. McGlade said that next week is an optimal time because it gives teams a month of conference games in advance to know what the stakes are.
Though it will not likely prove itself as a factor for A-10 teams, the NCAA has a 13-game minimum requirement to qualify for the NCAA Championship. One of those games can be counted from conference championship play.
Saint Louis, St. Bonaventure, UMass and Fordham all have nine total games played, which is the least amount of games any team in the A-10 has played up to this point. That leaves over a month for the quartet of A-10 teams to play only three games.
The conference tournament is scheduled for March 10-14, exactly a week after March 3, or the day in which the final scheduled conference games are set to take place.
McGlade talked before the season about wanting “every team to be available” for that week should there be any postponed games. Obviously that window will play a factor on teams — such as the four that were aforementioned — that may be behind other conference teams because of postponements due to COVID-19.
Joey Aliberti can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @JosephAliberti1
