It begins in three days.
Right down the road, next to I-75, we’ll have 16 teams going at it for four days, all playing for a trip to the NCAA tournament.
Yes, Mercer is Division I and has been for a while. Mercer is one of 334 Division I basketball programs, and both the men and women have been to the NCAA tournament.
Due in large part to an aggressive approach in the Godsey administration, Mercer actually — and finally — made a nice step forward in winning the right to host the A-Sun tournament, to the joy of some and consternation and questioning of others.
The obvious advantage is location.
Whereas Macon was a stopping-off point for teams traveling to Nashville, Tenn., the destination is now no more than six hours from seven of the other 10 schools in the conference.
USC Upstate and Florida Gulf Coast aren’t eligible for A-Sun postseason until the 2011-12 year as they continue the transition from Division II.
But Kennesaw State and North Florida will be ready for this year’s tournament, their reclassification period ending during the summer. That adds two schools within easy driving distance.
The move saves the conference a few thousand dollars in travel and lodging for its staff and saves two teams from central and south Florida and four from Jacksonville money and time with less driving and lower hotel expenses.
Perhaps most importantly, more fans are able to make the trip.
That’s especially relevant on championship day. Take the most recent one. How many more Jacksonville fans would have been able to come to Macon for two championship games rather than go to Nashville? Certainly a whole lot more than the 100 or 150 who were in Nashville and enough to make up for a disappointing ETSU turnout.
Nashville is a great city, a very tolerable metro city and great tournament host city. But the A-Sun gets woefully lost, especially at tournament time.
The city also hosted the Ohio Valley Conference tournament at the same time a year ago, and the OVC is a higher-profile group of larger schools with a better geographic footprint and stronger tradition.
Four OVC schools are in Tennessee, and only one school has a drive of longer than five hours to Nashville.
Throw in the general interest as a Vandy basketball town, the NHL’s Predators and that Lipscomb and Belmont are private schools of a combined 9,500 enrollment, and you have a city that won’t promote the A-Sun.
The four days of basketball — we’ll be going from noon to 11 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, and at noon and 6 p.m. on Saturday — give Macon a chance to work on its image as a, well, anything town.
It’s certainly a chance to upgrade the old reputation as a basketball city. A week after the A-Sun tournament, Macon hosts three-fifths of the state high school basketball tournament, welcoming alasses A through AAA to the Macon Coliseum.
Folks, don’t bellyache. Save some money now for two weeks of quality hoops.
Worries about the size of the University Center can be put to rest for a while. Even when the A-Sun finale has been an all-Nashville matchup, seats were available. Host Lipscomb’s tournament game Thursday night against Campbell last March filled maybe 40 percent of the seats, and the semifinal game against top-seeded Jacksonville was played in front of about 3,400, 68 percent of capacity.
The UC’s seating capacity is 3,200, and it could easy get another hundred or so in there.
And when not having enough seats on a regular basis becomes the problem, the A-Sun will happily deal with it. Turning people away for one or two games out of more than a dozen doesn’t change the UC’s appropriateness.
Now, as for Mercer as the tournament host, that will be as interesting as some of the games. It’s a work in progress, to say the least, and we thank God for the death of ancient Porter Gym — 15 or 20 years too late — and the birth of the they-almost-got-it-100 percent-right University Center.
Belmont has pretty much set the standard administratively as well as on the court, and Mercer, like others, is trying to be Belmontesque. Well, the Bears are at least close in roundball.
Nevertheless, the tournament host has a picturesque campus around which there is nothing but growth and a quality facility and two decent basketball teams that the city is slowly embracing. Actual marketing from the school hasn’t hurt, but wins still sell more tickets than anything.
As for the basketball this week, expect a mess, surprises and unpredictability. All teams did from start to finish this season was beat each other. Consider that each No. 8 seed beat a contender at least once.
This has become a group in which teams can rise or fall three or four spots from Thursday to Saturday.
This is a balanced conference with better basketball players than you think, from Mercer’s James Florence and Courtney Ford to East Tennessee’s Siarre Evans and Belmont’s Haley Nelson, to name a few.
On hand will be players who have taken down ranked teams in the regular season and terrified others in the NCAA tournament, who are among the top 100 — and top 25 in some cases — statistically in the nation.
There are plenty of players good enough to be in the uniform of more familiar programs, and some who will draw a salary for playing.
It’s the madness we love from March, and it’s here, in three days.
Contact Michael A. Lough at 744-4626 or mlough@macon.com
