The Road to Securing an NCAA Event: A Sports Commission’s Perspective
Have you ever had the NCAA bring a national championship event to your community? Well, I’m the Sports Development Manager for Sports QC and this blog post will hopefully give you some insight into how we acquired a DI Regional Championship in our must-visit riverfront destination, the Quad Cities. I’m going to give you an inside look at the bidding process, the challenges that Sports QC and our community faced, and how everything came together in the end (or the very very end in our case)!
I started my NCAA bid process in August 2023 (keep an eye on the timeline throughout the process because instant gratification in this process is impossible). I attended the Connect Marketplace Tradeshow in Minneapolis, MN. The first day of Connect included an optional NCAA Bid Cycle Presentation for interested DMO’s and sports commissions, which was around three hours long. The three hours consisted of attending different educational sessions run by different NCAA Championship Managers to discuss what they need to host their championships, what they’ve seen previously when selecting the location for their specific championships, ways to improve a bid, and things that communities commonly forget to include. One session that I attended was about the DIII Cross Country and DIII Outdoor Track and Field Championships. These intrigued me because they are two sports that don’t initially come to mind when we think of athletics, but the impact these events have due to the number of athletes that travel to the prospective host community is major, especially in a metro under 500,000 people such as ours.
After Connect, I started to get excited about the prospect of bringing NCAA events to our community. We shared our excitement with some of our local partners that could be involved in events and got ready to attend the NCAA’s Bid Symposium in Indianapolis, IN. We attended the Bid Symposium about 2 weeks after the Connect Marketplace and brought a full SUV containing our Sports Development Manager (me), our President/CEO, the VP of Business Growth/Director of Sports QC, the Athletic Director from Augustana College (and a longtime, well-recognized member of various NCAA committees), and the general manager of TPC Deere Run. I think that having the five of us in attendance was incredibly valuable because it allowed us to become educated on the process, while also networking and building value in our community with numerous championship managers. Here we are getting ready for our big day at the NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis for the NCAA Bid Symposium:
The NCAA Bid Symposium was a day-long event beginning at 9:00 am with a large opening session, and then dispersed into various 30-minute breakout sessions.
Here are the different sessions that were available and what the day’s schedule looked like:
- Men’s Frozen Four
- DI Women’s Volleyball
- Women’s Basketball
- Women’s Basketball Q&A
- Men’s Basketball
- Men’s Basketball Q&A
- Division I
- DI/DII/DIII Men’s Lacrosse
- Hotel Program
- Division III
- Division II/Festival
- Bid Portal/ Budgets
- NC Women’s Gymnastics
- DI Women’s Lacrosse
- DI Wrestling
There were many benefits to the NCAA Bid Symposium, but one that I found to be the most important was the time between each educational session. This time was important because most of the NCAA Championship Managers were available for the entire day at booths. While champ managers are at their booths we had the opportunity to meet with them, ask questions, gain insights, and learn about their prospective sport. The connection that our local athletic director has to various NCAA committees was incredible, his connections and knowledge in the NCAA community were exceptionally valuable to our team at the Symposium. We were also able to make a connection between TPC Deere Run’s general manager and the championship managers who run the DI Men’s and Women’s Golf Championships and Regionals.
Attending the Bid Symposium was beneficial because we were able to learn about how the NCAA’s process works, meet their hotel affiliate, learn about championship operations, and get insight into the NCAA’s newly designed bid portal. This bid year, they released a new function which is similar to a “copy bid” function so that the same information can be copied from year to year if you’re bidding on both years in the same cycle. While we were there, we also took a detour through the Hall of Champions, which I would recommend that anyone stop by and check out if you’re in Indy.
We left the bid symposium and then the tough task started. We laid out a plan of action, got organized, and had a couple of touch base meetings to decide which specific championships that we wanted to target. We decided that our community could be a great fit for many championship events and there were six different championships that we wanted to bid on for the next two-year cycle which were, DIII Wrestling, DIII Cross Country, DIII Outdoor Track and Field, DII Women’s Basketball, NC Women’s Bowling, and DI M/W Golf.
The next seven months consisted of setting in-person and virtual meetings with Augustana College’s various athletic coaches to learn about their experience in other communities at previous championships and to determine if it would be plausible for our community to have the capacity and bandwidth to host their event. We scheduled and completed numerous meetings and emails with NCAA Championship Managers over the months prior to their bid deadline. This was to get information on previous championship hosts, give insight into our area about our prospective hosts, and form a closer relationship with a new potential partner. I believe that showcasing our ability to collaborate with different colleges and communities through our virtual meetings with the Men’s and Women’s Golf Committee Chairs had a big impact in their process to select our community as a DI Women’s Regional Golf Championship host in 2028.
It was important to familiarize myself with the NCAA’s bid portal early because there are intricacies and nuances that could have made submission tricky (especially as the deadline crept up quickly). For instance, for each sport that we submitted our championship bid we included a bid packet (not required by the NCAA) that contained our proposed local organizing committee, letters of support from coaches and the hosting city mayor plus our CEO/president, available hotels nearby the venue with information on each, information on the proposed venue, banquet options, and local volunteer organizations that would be involved. In the NCAA’s bid portal there are multiple tabs where specific information is filled out for the LOC contacts, venue specs and photos, budget, grant assistance, event insurance, relevant sport questions, emergency action plan, the partnering host institution, and more. The NCAA’s portal is user-friendly, and I found it easy to navigate. The only issues that I had with the portal were on deadline day and the NCAA was incredibly responsive and made changes quickly to send out communication and remedy the problem. The deadline day for submitting all of our proposals for the ’26-’27 and ’27-’28 in the NCAA Bid Portal was February 7, 2024, but this still wasn’t the end for our journey! Keep a look out for part 2 of this blog post to find out what happened next…