(WGHP) — The ACC Women’s Basketball Tournament may uproot from Greensboro in the coming years, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips suggested Wednesday during day two of the ACC Tipoff.
When asked if the ACC Women’s Basketball Tournament was committed to Greensboro long-term or if a rotating model was possible, Phillips said Greensboro has been “a wonderful home for the women’s tournament and the men’s tournament,” but they are also looking at Charlotte.
“We will certainly continue to populate Greensboro with our championship, but we’re in a new home, as well, in Charlotte, and we want to take advantage of this world-class city,” Phillips said.
He added that the tournament currently has contractual agreements in North Carolina to receive funding, and the ACC intends to honor those commitments.
The conference has already announced plans to hold the 2024 ACC Women’s Basketball tournament at the Greensboro Coliseum from March 6 to 10, but the future is unclear.
The commissioner alluded to a possible announcement this fall outlining “the next three or four years with our basketball tournaments as well as our Olympic sports.”
The Greensboro Coliseum has hosted the ACC Women’s Basketball Tournament each year since 2000, excluding only 2017 when the tournament was held at the HTC Center in Conway, South Carolina.
Stanford, Cal and SMU join the ACC
The comments come less than two months after the conference revealed that it would be adding three new teams to its roster. Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, will both depart Pac-12, and Southern Methodist University in Texas will depart the American Athletic Conference, formerly the Big East, all starting in the 2024-25 school year.
“We are a national conference,” Phillips said Wednesday. “We’ve been a regional conference. Times have changed. You either go on the offensive or you don’t.”
The three new additions up the number of ACC schools based in states that do not border the Atlantic Ocean to six alongside Notre Dame and Pittsburgh, which joined in 2013, and Louisville, which joined in 2014.
The ACC currently includes Boston College, Clemson University, Duke University, Florida State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Louisville, Miami University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Notre Dame, Pitt University, Syracuse University, the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest University.
Decline of Pac-12
Stanford and Cal are splitting from the California-based conference Pac-12, which, in addition to the Golden State, includes schools in Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Utah and Washington. However, that roster quickly eroded in August. Most of its teams have announced plans to leave the conference, starting first with the University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Southern California last year and followed by six more teams in one fell swoop in early August.
UCLA and USC revealed on June 30, 2022, that the teams would be leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten conference beginning July 1, 2024.
On July 26 of this year, the Big 12 welcomed the University of Colorado, Boulder, out of the Pac-12
On Aug. 4, the University of Oregon and the University of Washington announced that they would be following UCLA and USC to the Big Ten, and the Big 12 revealed that the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and the University of Utah would be following Colorado.
The departures have left behind only Oregon State and Washington State.
