Couch: MHSAA faces dilemma with state finals conflict at Breslin

EAST LANSING – The high school basketball state finals at Breslin Center, as you know them, are over for good. For a while, at least. They’ll be elsewhere beginning next year. Or scheduled differently.

It’s too bad. There’s no better place. Probably no better format than having the boys and girls semifinals and finals having their own stage over consecutive weeks in East Lansing. It’s a big-deal venue, smack dab in the center of the state.

But you can’t have two events at once in the same arena. And so you have a dilemma.

There’s a chance, every year now, that Michigan State’s women’s basketball team will occupy Breslin for the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament. Next year, the women’s NCAA tournament conflicts with the girls high school semis and finals. The year after, with the boys final weekend. This year, the Michigan High School Athletic Association’s contract with Breslin expired.

The problem began in 2015, when the NCAA did away with predetermined sites for the opening weekend of its women’s basketball tournament, instead having the top four seeds in each region host the first two rounds. In 2016, MSU earned a No. 4 seed, but with Breslin booked, had to play on the road at No. 5-seed Mississippi State, losing in the second round in a close game with all the dynamics that usually favor the home team.

MSU athletic director Mark Hollis made it clear then that he wouldn’t let it happen again.

“They’ve been put in a very difficult situation and now we’ve been put in a very difficult situation,” MHSAA Executive Director Jack Roberts said Friday at Breslin, during the boys semifinals.

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The boys tournament has finished at Breslin since 1994, with the contract renewed most recently in 2011. The girls have been there since 2003, interrupted by a stint at Eastern Michigan’s Convocation Center from 2007-09.

“You don’t want to sit around and hope that the (MSU women are) lousy,” Roberts continued. “You want to hope that they’re good. They can’t send a signal to their women’s team (that we don’t think you’ll be good enough) … and we can’t be in a position of being bounced out (of a venue) with 10 days or 14 days notice. And trying to have a spot on reserve as a backup? First of all, what facility wants to be considered a backup? Some might, some others won’t. And can we afford the cost of having them stay empty for three days in March? The cost of having them do that for the girls in ’18 is one thing. The cost of having them do that for the boys in ’19 would be quite a bit more.”

This issue goes beyond MSU, which has been a top-four seed four times in the last 13 years and a 5-seed four more times in that span. The potential conflict is the same at any Division I university. Even if the odds are lower at Central Michigan, booking the MHSAA state finals — or part of them — sends its women’s team the message: “We don’t believe in you.”

The dilemma, from a university perspective, is that the MHSAA state finals have worth.

“From athletic department’s standpoint and from an alumnus, I see high value in people coming across the state, coming to campus,” Hollis said Friday by phone during his travels as NCAA men’s basketball tournament committee chair. “But I also see value in having our student-athletes and fans be able to participate in postseason when earned.”

The options are these:

• Move the MHSAA finals dates so as not to collide with the beginning of the NCAA women’s tournament, which would adjust the season calendar.
• Leave Breslin entirely, finding a venue that doesn’t have ties to Division I college basketball — meaning The Palace of Auburn Hills (as long as it exists), Detroit’s new Little Ceasars Arena (if the Pistons and Red Wings could both be on the road two weekends in a row) or Grand Rapids’ Van Andel Arena.
• Adjust the boys calendar, when needed, to work with Breslin and move the girls elsewhere, perhaps to Central Michigan, Western Michigan or Eastern Michigan, three schools where their women’s teams have never been a top-four seed in the NCAA tournament. CMU hosted the girls’ MHSAA finals from 1997-2003. EMU, as mentioned, from 2007-09.
• Begin and end the boys and girls state tournaments at the same time, playing the finals on the same weekend — and only the championship games at Breslin Center. This one might be the best solution for next season, if only temporary.
• MSU decides having the MHSAA basketball semis and finals on its campus two weekends in a row has more value than hosting a women’s NCAA tournament weekend roughly every four years, and thus creates a backup plan for the MSU women for those years — be it in Grand Rapids, Detroit or elsewhere. That plan likely couldn’t include Jenison Field House, which lacks certain amenities to reasonably host the NCAA tournament, I’ve been told.

The latter of those options is probably off the table. The optics of the Breslin Student Events Center not being available to MSU student-athletes for their postseason is something that’s hard to explain. Hollis and Co. learned this last year.

MSU athletics is a tenant of Breslin, so, in theory, MSU’s decision is not entirely up to Hollis. But Joel Heberlein, director of the Spartan Hospitality Group, the division that oversees Breslin, said Friday it would be impossible to have the MHSAA state finals at Breslin on the dates that conflict with the women’s NCAA tournament, and that MSU is expecting proposals soon from the MHSAA.

The creativity and adjustment is going to have to come from the MHSAA, which discussed the issues and options at its representative council meeting on Friday. The rep council meets again May 7-8. By then, there should be a solution — even if just for next year.

“We might come up with an emergency plan for 2018 only,” Roberts said. "I think the final answer is going to be a combination of venue of schedule. In fact, maybe enough can be done enough with the schedule, that the venue can stay, that we only need the big venue one weekend, not two.”

That idea means only the championship games would be played at Breslin, cutting the number of kids who get to have that experience in half.

Roberts has concerns about extending the season on either end, bumping up against fall or spring sports, though part of the issue is Michigan begins and ends its basketball seasons later than most states. Illinois and Indiana, for example, wrap up their girls tournaments at the end of February and beginning of March. In Illinois — where Thanksgiving tournaments and 25-game regular-season schedules are an accepted way of life — the state finals are at Illinois State’s Redbird Arena. In Indiana, they play all the championship games at Banker’s Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, home of the NBA’s Indiana Pacers. In Ohio, where the postseason timeline is similar to Michigan and finals are played at Ohio State’s Value City Arena, the Ohio State women host NCAA tournament games at the old St. John Arena on campus.

This predicament is an unintended consequence of the lack of broad and intense interest in women’s college basketball. The NCAA, which isn’t helping to increase parity in the women’s game by having home sites in early round tournament games, is sensitive to crowd size and atmosphere for its athletes.

The NCAA, to its credit, has decided not to try to duplicate the men’s tournament, but to do what it thinks is best for the women. Perhaps the MHSAA could take a cue from this — what’s the same isn’t what’s always best. Roberts acknowledged great experiences when the girls semis and finals were played at CMU, which now, at renovated McQuirk Arena, seats 5,300.

“Central, we can fill it and that has a good feel to it,” Roberts said. “For most of the sessions, it has been adequate. There have been a couple of times when we had to squeeze people in, but that felt good to everybody. We loved the excitement of that. So Central’s not out of the mix. And a facility of that size should stay in the mix.

“The ideal is boys and girls at the same venue. We love it here (at Breslin). We’ve been treated well. Our sponsors like it here. We have Hoopfest (next door at Jenison Field House) that we like here. We have a lot of things here that we’d like to keep going.”

Including tradition. On the boys side especially, Breslin has been the destination of dreams for 24 years. That’s all players these days know. The venue, to them, matters.

“It matters for me. I think it matters for these kids,” West Bloomfield coach Jeremy Denha said Friday after his team’s Class A semifinal loss to Clarkston — a game that wouldn’t have been at Breslin if only the finals were played there. “This is the mecca for us. All these kids growing up, this is the mecca. It’s the house Coach Izzo built.”

“You see a lot of these kids wide-eyed,” former Lansing Sexton coach Carlton Valentine said, watching the semifinals from the front row. “It’s a big moment for a lot of these kids.”

Contact Graham Couch a gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.