NCAA Tournament returns to Sacramento. Here’s what you need to know

Another wave of basketball is breaking in Sacramento.

The first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament invade Golden 1 Center with eight Division I men’s teams settling into the downtown NBA venue for single-elimination games on Thursday and Saturday. It’s the sports gift the arena keeps on giving.

The DoCo – Downtown Commons – site is alive with the winning Kings after 16 dreadful seasons of non-playoff activity. Chants of “Light the Beam!” regularly reverberate throughout the arena and beyond when the Kings win, and, for the first time since 2006, they’ve won more than they’ve lost.

Golden 1 Center was also the host site, again, for the CIF State Basketball Championships to cap the high school seasons. Sacramento State qualified for its first NCAA Women’s Tournament on Wednesday in Boise, where Hornets athletic director Mark Orr said that he considered reaching out to the Kings to light a green beam to match his school colors.

“We all need a beam now,” Orr said excitedly.

Sacramento State on Sunday learned of its March Madness date, against UCLA. Orr is invested in his Hornets, certainly, and the March Madness visit as the NCAA’s host school. Orr, Visit Sacramento CEO and President Mike Testa and a host of others have worked to present an attractive bid, to prepare and set up for the whirlwind event.

“It’s a crazy time right now, a great time, basketball everywhere, and the Kings are good, and the NCAA is coming,” Testa said.

Which teams are coming to Golden 1 Center?

The competition for venue bids is fierce with hundreds of colleges trying to get into the action.

Visit Sacramento is the city’s convention and visitors bureau whose aim is to secure events like this. It’s a three-fold pursuit: Secure a popular product sure to sell out; help produce an entertaining product; and generate revenue for the city.

So, who’s coming to Golden 1 Center? On Selection Sunday, the NCAA released the NCAA brackets, seeding the 68-team field to be shared and dissected. May the office-pool debates and dollars flow.

Thursday’s opening-round games are:

• Utah State vs. Missouri, 10:30 a.m., TNT

• Arizona vs. Princeton, 1:30 p.m., TNT

• Boise State vs. Northwestern, 4:35 p.m., truTV

• UCLA vs. UNC-Asheville, 7:05 p.m., truTV

UCLA and Arizona represent a familiar brand out of the Pac-12 Conference. UCLA is in its 52nd NCAA Tournament and Arizona its 32nd, all since 1985. Princeton is in its 26th NCAA Tournament, always a dangerous darkhorse.

The NCAA Tournament is never without some humor. At Arizona’s NCAA bracket-release watch party on campus on Sunday, Wildcats coach Tommy Lloyd said of Princeton: “They’re an Ivy League school, so I’m sure they’re going to be smarter than us.”

Every region includes a game that may not resonate with all fans because of the unknown. At Golden 1, that will be UNC-Asheville of North Carolina, but the Bulldogs do have a star in 6-foot-11 senior forward Drew Pember.

Who wins is anyone’s guess. This much is known: Sacramento will be the college basketball capital of Northern California. That’s why the games sell out.

Chris Jones, a physical education teacher at Sutter Middle School in Folsom, is treating his 19-year-old son Brent to an early birthday present with tickets to Thursday’s early games.

“Anytime you get a chance to see something different, you do it, and college basketball is just a blast,” Jones said. “You get to see the bands and the fans, the atmosphere, people walking around in school colors and shirts and hats. It’s just so cool because anything can happen.”

Testa and his staff have projected the economic impact of this March Madness visit right down to the last dollar: $9,372,428 – so let’s call it $10 million.

Visit Sacramento is tasked with securing the hotels, and that’s a competitive pursuit, too. Eight Sacramento hotels have been contracted and 11,352 total rooms have been booked. Testa said the rooms are for “for team personnel, fans traveling with teams, general basketball fans, etc.”

March Madness at all the national sites will boil a 68-team field to one winner. Second-round games will be held March 18-19, followed by catchy nicknames for the later rounds: the Sweet 16 on March 23-23, the Elite Eight on March 25-26, the Final Four on April 1 and the title game on April 3 in Houston.

March Madness early rounds and at the end have been a big draw for decades – in person, or at home, or at the bar.

According to WalletHub, a tidy sum of $16.3 billion will be tied to corporate losses “due to unproductive workers during March Madness.”

By the way, when did the phrase “March Madness” start? It was first used by an Illinois high school official named Henry Porter in 1939 but it didn’t become the norm in the NCAA Tournament until 1982, when Brent Musburger of CBS mentioned it in a broadcast.

Sacramento is a basketball city

A common theme for all the March Madness venues is a splendid venue. Without one, a city has no chance to host such events.

Arco Arena, the Kings home in Natomas from 1988 to 2016, hosted NCAA rounds in 1994, 1998, 2002 and 2007. But by 2009, the NCAA was no longer interested in the arena, deeming it too archaic.

In 2014, the construction of Golden 1 Center was enough to persuade the NCAA to bring the event back to Sacramento. The arena opened in the fall of 2017 with Paul McCartney the opening act, and the March Madness opening-round visit six months later generated more excitement than another lost Kings campaign.

Every NCAA game that weekend was a sellout. The economic impact for the city was $4 million, according to the NCAA.

The Kings don’t see March Madness as a threat to their product. They see the NCAA return as a boost for everyone.

Said Kings Owner and Chairman Vivek Ranadivé in a statement when the NCAA announced that Golden 1 Center had secured the bid: “Sacramento, a city built on basketball, is home to the best fans in the NBA and will provide the perfect backdrop for collegiate competition at our world-class facility in the heart of Northern California.”

The NCAA was scheduled to return in 2020 but the event was canceled days before the start due to the pandemic.

“Golden 1 is a huge selling point,” Testa said. “The first time we had it there in 2017, the student-athletes really had a great time, an experience, and that resonated hugely with the NCAA. One thing I don’t worry about is selling the arena. Whether it’s the high school state championships or March Madness or the NBA, we have a building that’s attractive and works.

“It’s night and day what Arco was. We’re always in the rotation for bids, and we raise our hands and express interest.”

Testa added: “The last time we were supposed to have it, in 2020, people were so excited. The arena had just opened, and then we had the pandemic. It’s been a long wait to get to now but we knew it was coming. The fact that it’s here again is great. Life feels like it’s back to normal and people get to celebrate basketball.”

National TV audience for March Madness

So, who attends the March Madness games here?

Testa said a mix – locals, or those, say, from the Bay Area – come here to soak in Sacramento and basketball. An allotment of tickets for the attending teams will be snatched up in a matter of minutes. Another boost: the national TV and streaming audience will put Sacramento on blast.

“It’s just extremely cool,” Testa said. “All those people watching nationally and internationally, the bumper shots of the Tower Bridge, it’s a nice post card for our city.”

Melody Williams, a retired teacher from Elk Grove, has attended NCAA Women’s Tournament games in Sacramento and men’s games at Arco Arena. She will attend Golden 1 games this week with family members.

“What a nice time to be in Sacramento with the Kings and now this,” she said. “I remember when the Kings were in the playoffs all those years ago, and we’d see the TV shots of the city. It’s a prideful thing. It’ll happen again this week, too. It shows were not some little city any more.”

Testa said March Madness resonates because it’s impossible to project what will happen in the games, with the usual upsets and upstarts.

“I’m a huge fan,” Testa said. “This is the fun stuff. The reason we go after these events and music festivals is because these are things we all like. People don’t have to leave Sacramento to find it. It’s here.”

Orr, the Sacramento State athletic director, is a native of Sacramento. March Madness didn’t visit when he was a teenager attending Christian Brothers High School in Oak Park in the early 1990s. Now it’s become the norm and one he aims to hold onto.

When he was hired in 2017 to run the Hornets athletic department, Orr declared that Sacramento State could and should be a big-time player in college sports, including as the host school for NCAA events.

Sacramento State will have an army of staffers running the event at Golden 1 Center, just as it did in 2017. The NCAA Women’s Tournament will include a Golden 1 Center visit in 2026 with Sacramento State the host school.

“It’s great to have March Madness back, and the last time it was, DoCo wasn’t even up and going yet,” Orr said. “I think it’ll really be buzzing. The 2020 March Madness was supposed to be the year to really show what this city is about, with downtown, and then the pandemic.

“We wanted to bring the NCAA back to Sacramento and show the country how we can host our March Madness. And it’s not just the arena that people like. It’s the surrounding area, the restaurants, the hotels, the community, the people. It’s a proven thing at Golden 1 and we’ll get it back, I’m sure. It’s good for the city, good for Sac State. It’s just good all over.”