NCAA basketball regional returns to KC along with wrestling, volleyball championships
The final bids for hosting future NCAA championships were due on a day that wasn’t convenient for Kansas City — Monday, Feb. 3, the day after the Chiefs won the Super Bowl.
“But being the smart and proactive team that we are, we submitted the bid before the big game because we had good reason to believe we’d be executing a Super Bowl parade,” said Kathy Nelson, Kansas City Sports Commission president and CEO.
Win-win.
The parade rolled through downtown, and on Wednesday Kansas City learned it had landed three big NCAA events in men’s basketball, wrestling and volleyball.
T-Mobile Center, formerly Sprint Center, will be the site for the men’s basketball Midwest Regional in March 2023; the NCAA wrestling championships in March 2024, and NCAA volleyball championships in December 2025.
Kansas City had submitted bids for five sports. It landed three of the most popular, events that typically fill arenas. The NCAA attendance records for volleyball’s national semifinals and championship match were set in Kansas City in 2017.
The Sports Commission estimates an economic impact of the three championships to total $35.6 million, and the championships are added to the inventory of future major sporting events.
Kansas City will be the site of the NFL Draft in April 2023. And the city remains in the running as a site for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with an announcement expected sometime in 2021.
That’s in addition to the Big 12 men’s and women’s basketball tournaments that are set for Kansas City through 2025.
It was during the Big 12 Tournament last March that sports shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. Events slowly returned, some abbreviated like baseball. Wednesday’s announcement of NCAA events from 2022-23 through 2025-26 hope to come off while speaking of COVID-19 in past tense.
“It show a few things,” Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said. “There is this question of when do we get back to normal? We get to see what our rebound looks like. And we get to see that Kansas City will continue to excel.
“This is not a time for Kansas City to take a step back. What you’re seeing from the interest from the NCAA and from broad-based sports and tourism interest is that Kansas City is still well-positioned with our facilities, with our hotels to be the sort of place that’s welcoming folks, safely, as we get back to what the next phase of our country looks like.”
Also in some ways the next phase of Kansas City. The new, single-terminal airport is expected to open in 2023. The streetcar extension is scheduled to be completed in 2025.
“When you’re looking at the way things are lining up, 2023 can be one of those amazing years in Kansas City, they way you hear about 1976 with the Republican Convention or the NCAA Final Four in 1988,” Lucas said.
In 2023, T-Mobile Center will be one of the four men’s basketball tournament regional sites. Kansas City last held that event in 2019, when Auburn defeated Kentucky in the final to advance to the Final Four.
The 134 men’s NCAA Tournament games played in Kansas City — at Municipal Auditorium, Kemper Arena and T-Mobile Center, formerly Sprint Center — are the most by one city.
The only other time Kansas City held the NCAA wrestling championship was 2003 at Kemper.
Kansas City twice has been the site of the NCAA volleyball championship, in 2010 and 2017 at Sprint Center.
Several MIAA sites will be home to Division II championships:
The 2023 and 2024 women’s basketball championships, the Elite Eight, will be held at the St. Joseph Civic Center near the Missouri Western State campus.
The 2023 men’s and women’s cross country championships will be held at Missouri Southern.
Emporia State’s Welch Stadium will be the site of the 2024 and 2026 outdoor track and field championships.
Pittsburg State will play host to the 2024 indoor track and field championships.
Newman University in Wichita will be the site of the 2024 wrestling championships.
This story was originally published October 14, 2020 at 12:35 PM.