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New NCAA President Charlie Baker got the hard sell from Gov. Eric Holcomb as the two sat together at the Indiana Pacers game on Monday night.
The pitch? That the Indianapolis-based NCAA should host more events in its home state.
“One of the things Gov. Holcomb talked about was how much people in Indianapolis and Indiana love sports, especially college sports,” Baker told IBJ on Friday.
Baker, who officially stepped into the head job at the NCAA last week, replacing longtime leader Mark Emmert, said he’s receptive to the idea—particularly given the state’s long track record of hosting major amateur and professional sporting events.
That list of college sporting events for the city has had some notable entries in recent years, in particular the entire NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament in 2021, the non-NCAA College Football Playoff National Championship last year and the Division II swimming and diving championships underway this week at the IU Natatorium.
Keeping Indiana and Indianapolis in mind for more big events makes sense, Baker said, because residents have “proven over and over again that they will turn out and support those kinds of activities,” and organizing groups like the Indiana Sports Corp. continue to be good partners.
“So, I would fully expect that there will continue to be a lot of activity here,” Baker said. “But as a national organization, we need to … do the best we can to give lots of destinations an opportunity to be part of this.”
The NCAA has already made a long-term commitment to Indianapolis—at least for top-tier basketball. In 2004, five years after the organization moved its operations to Indianapolis from Kansas City, Missouri, the NCAA signed a 35-year deal to host the men’s and women’s Final Four in Indianapolis an average of once every five years. Under the agreement, the city also is set to host earlier rounds of those tournaments or host the NCAA convention.
The women’s Final Four hasn’t been in Indianapolis since 2016 (the city also hosted in 2005 and 2011), and by the time it hosts again in 2028, it will have been 12 years since the city last hosted the event. Even so, the men’s Final Four will see a gap of only three years from the time it hosts in 2026 and again in 2029. Not to mention the 2021 men’s tournament, which saw 64 games over a one-month period, most of them played at venues in Indianapolis.
The same deal that solidified Indianapolis as a routine host city for the NCAA also brought an extension of the organization’s commitment to the city for office space. The NCAA is expected to remain in Indianapolis through at least 2039—with three 10-year lease-extension options that would take it through 2069.
The event rotation and headquarters agreement was one made when Myles Brand led the NCAA, and it’s not something Baker said he expects to reexamine during his time at the helm.
“Indianapolis has been the home of the NCAA for a long time now, and in many ways it’s the perfect location … and I think in many respects it was a really strategically smart move to locate here in the first place,” he said. “I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t want to continue to be part of this community going forward.”
In Indianapolis, most NCAA employees are on a hybrid schedule themselves, with a requirement to work in their headquarters office at White River State Park at least a few times per week. Baker said he doesn’t expect to alter those arrangements any time soon.
I’ve asked a lot of questions about it, and most people seem pretty comfortable with” the hybrid model, he said.
He also acknowledged that he personally doesn’t plan to move to Indianapolis full-time. Instead, he will rent an apartment and split his time between his home in Massachusetts, Indianapolis and various work-travel obligations—such as Washington D.C., where the NCAA is busy lobbying Congress for legislation that would regulate amateur athletics.
The configuration will allow Baker to visit the national office routinely, while also venturing out to the thousands of schools that make up the NCAA for campus visits and outreach efforts, the organization has said. It also comes at a time when Baker is trying to reshape the NCAA into an entity more focused on serving the needs of its member organizations.
“The way I think about it is, there are a whole bunch of fairly significant issues in college sports these days, and my view is the NCAA needs to be a positive force for securing what I would describe as the right future for all of college athletics,” he said. “What we have to do is figure out how to make sure that the greatness of college sports—which is the opportunity it creates for young people to find themselves .. and the foundation on which they build their life—is sustained going forward.”
As for Holcomb’s efforts to keep Indiana in conversations for more events in the future, Baker said the 2021 tournament earned the state a lot of goodwill, and he’s optimistic for what the future holds.
“The community has been an incredible partner … I think people really stepped up to create a basketball tournament at a point in time when most people really weren’t sure if they can pull that off. That was a big story for Indiana and Indianapolis.”
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Evansville is also home to the DII men’s basketball championship. I believe that Ft Wayne has hosted DIII basketball championship.