https://caasports.com/news/2023/7/27/caa...n-d-c.aspx

This agreement is for both the men's and women's tournaments to be held at the Entertainment & Sports Arena.

This is where the men's tournament has been the past few seasons.

It's a very nice arena, and a good size for what the conference needs. It's not in a great location, but it's easy enough to stay elsewhere and metro to the arena.

CBS Sports will air the men's semis/finals and the women's finals, everything else is on Flo.

This is underwhelming. The league is accepting that it won't be able to draw more than 4,000 fans to a session for the next 4 years. Its amazing how far this event has fallen from where it was in Richmond 10-15 years ago.
I will be in country this March, but I have little expectation that it will be worth the trip to DC for me.
I hope that I am wrong.
Go Tribe!

I'd rather have a packed 4k capacity arena than a mostly empty 18k arena.

I do think something slightly larger would be better, but really the only time the tournament draws a large crowd is if the host institution is in the championship game. The 2018 championship had almost 8k fans, when it was in Charleston and CoC made the finals. The only other game I saw in recent memory that was substantively over 4k was when we were in the championship in Baltimore. Also, a lot of arenas in the ~8k capacity range are college gyms, and to me it would feel weird if the CAA tournament was held on George Mason/George Washington's campus.

It seems like there's room for the E&S arena to expand or add temporary bleachers, if there's a year where the attendance demands that, but I don't know if that's actually logistically feasible.

If we ever had a strong contender we wound dominate attendance at a DC-based tournament.

(07-27-2023 04:15 PM)tribeinexile Wrote:  If we ever had a strong contender we wound dominate attendance at a DC-based tournament.

Correct. I think the largest crowd the CAA has yet to have was our round 1 session game vs Elon the first year the tourney was held there. We were a #2 seed and it’s the only tourney game I’ve seen where the upper level was near full capacity.

I’ve grown to like the venue primarily because of the DC location and being a new facility.

At least it looks good from a televised perspective. Now if only we can get on a real streaming service so that people will see it

(07-27-2023 10:00 AM)TDenverFan Wrote:  It seems like there's room for the E&S arena to expand or add temporary bleachers, if there's a year where the attendance demands that, but I don't know if that's actually logistically feasible.

No place to add more temporary seats. All the seats behind the media tables at court side opposite the scorers table are bleacher seats now that pull out and is only about 6-8 rows. We prefer those seats as closer to court.

(08-01-2023 11:30 AM)wmmii Wrote:  

(07-27-2023 10:00 AM)TDenverFan Wrote:  It seems like there's room for the E&S arena to expand or add temporary bleachers, if there's a year where the attendance demands that, but I don't know if that's actually logistically feasible.

No place to add more temporary seats. All the seats behind the media tables at court side opposite the scorers table are bleacher seats now that pull out and is only about 6-8 rows. We prefer those seats as closer to court.

Gotcha, I haven't been to the arena in a few years, for some reason I thought there weren't any seats there, but I was misremembering.

Great decision. Excellent venue and a good location for our fanbase. The capacity is definitely not an issue - the conference has yet to fill more than 2/3 of the building.