LITTLE ROCK — If all goes well, UALR women’s basketball Coach Joe Foley could be rewarded with a bonus for making a trip to the NCAA Women’s Tournament in 2012: A home-court advantage.
UALR officials announced Wednesday that the school will host firstand second-round play at Jack Stephens Center, its five-year-old on-campus facility, for the first time. As a perk for playing hosts, the Trojans get to stay home if they’re among the 64-team field.
That’s if UALR, the favorite in the Sun Belt Conference West Division this season, can overcome losing senior guards Shanika Butler and Asriel Rolfe as well as Chastity Reed, the league’s preseason player of the year.
“I was thinking about redshirting them,” Foleyquipped, “but now I’ll just have to go ahead and do it for sure.”
The decision comes after the school submitted its application in the spring to NCAA officials, emphasizing the fourday, three-game subregional would get prime billing in Little Rock, and an effort to involve youth basketball programs as part of the event, said Andrea Duc, UALR’s director of sales and senior women’s administrator who is tasked with organizing the regional.
“It’s a big deal here in Little Rock,” she said. “We don’t get the men’s tournament every year. We don’t have a bowl game. If it were going to a bigger city, it might get put under the wayside.”
While UALR was notified it would host games at its 5,600-seat facility, which is the smallest of the 16 sites, an NCAA decision on what dates games will be played won’t be made until June 2011. Before ticketsare made available to the public, UALR season-ticket holders will get first dibs on seats, Duc said.
“They look for on-campus facilities in this tournament to engage the campus community to an even greater extent,” Duc said of the NCAA.
Two years ago, Little Rock played host the first and second rounds of the NCAA men’s tournament at North Little Rock’s Alltel Arena, now named Verizon Arena,which city tourism officials estimated would bring 14,000 to 30,000 visitors to central Arkansas.
Officials predicted tournament goers would shell out between $2.5 million and $4 million on hotel reservations, food, souvenirs and other purchases. On Wednesday, Duc said it was too early to know what kind of financial boon hosting the women’s tournament might have, only hinting it could have a significant impact.
“I’m sure there will be a study done to look at theeconomic impact of the tournament,” she said. “It just depends on what teams get sent here and where they’re traveling in from.”
Verizon Arena also hosted the SEC Women’s Tournament three times - in 2003, 2006 and 2009 - but saw attendance decline from 43,642 the first year to 20,397 in 2009.
UALR Athletic Director Chris Peterson said the decision to award hosting duties was part of a transitive series of events, starting with the construction of the Stephens Center and including the Trojans’ trip to the NCAA Tournament last season in Oklahoma City.
“The quality of women’sbasketball is a huge part of this process,” Peterson said. “With what we accomplished last season in Oklahoma City and being part of the top teams in the country at the end of the season, those are issues that play into the fact that we have a top-flight facility.”
Without the facility, he said it was unlikely Foley would have been coaxed from his former gig at Arkansas Tech to take over a program that was restarted in 1998. Without Foley’s uptempo motion style and top-flight facilities to lure prospects, the Trojans’ trip to the NCAA Tournament a season ago, culminating in a 68-63 victory over Georgia Tech, would have been a longer trek.
“It just adds more excitement to our program,” Foley said. “There’s no doubt it helps in recruiting, getting free advertising for a whole three or four days on TV. Hopefully, we’ll be playing out there, too.”
As for his role in helping secure Little Rock’s bid, Foley downplayed its importance, if just slightly.
“I get the least hardest job of the whole process,” he said. “I’m suppose to get my team there.”
Other schools earning firstand second-round sites for the 2012 tournament were Bowling Green, DePaul, Fairfield, Florida State, Gonzaga, Iowa State, LSU, Maryland, Notre Dame, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Old Dominion, Purdue, Texas A&M and Vanderbilt.
Sports, Pages 13 on 10/28/2010