There may be just one road to this year’s Women’s Final Four in Tampa or the annual Division I Men’s College World Series in Omaha, but there are a multitude of routes to Salem, Virginia – which annually hosts as many as five NCAA championship events.
This year, Salem will host its 50th championship for the Association when the Division III Men’s Basketball Championship semifinals tip off March 21 and the event continues the next day with the tournament’s nationally televised final.
The city also is scheduled to host Division III championships in softball and women’s lacrosse, and also for the 15th consecutive year in football – the sport for which Salem first offered its groundbreaking brand of hospitality in 1993.
“The driving force behind every one of the championships, going back to the very first championship we hosted – the first (Amos Alonzo) Stagg Bowl – was that we wanted this to be the best experience the student-athletes have ever experienced,” said Carey Harveycutter, director of civic facilities for the city of about 25,000.
NCAA sport committees – which have selected the city as host for 42 Division III events and eight Division II championships – have agreed again and again that the Roanoke Valley community succeeds in that mission. The city has been an innovator as a host, and other cities now emulate such Salem-originated practices as assigning host families to competing teams and providing mementos for student-athletes.
“Every committee within the Division III structure looks for exactly what Salem provides – the hospitality to the student-athlete and wonderful facilities for the events that they sponsor,” said Brad Bankston, commissioner of the city’s frequent championships hosting partner, the Salem-based Old Dominion Athletic Conference, and a former chair of the Division III Championships Committee. “That’s the model. Over time, people have caught on to that model.”
Harveycutter thinks the secret to Salem’s success is even more basic.
“The bottom line is the people,” he says. “It’s the people who volunteer as host families. It’s the people in the community who become involved and come to the games and matches, to watch teams that they may never even have heard of. The teams go to a hotel, and the front-desk people and the people who serve the meals want to know how they did in their game that day.”
Salem benefits from the partnership, too, averaging between $2 million and $4 million annually in economic benefit to the Roanoke Valley while gaining intangible benefits from national telecasts of the basketball and football championships.
“Down the road, is that a factor in somebody looking to move somewhere – to take a job or move a business?” Harveycutter asks. “Those of the kinds of things you can’t track. But they’re positive experiences, and anytime you have a positive experience about a community, it’s beneficial.”
Harveycutter thinks the city will keep doing the job it does for the NCAA’s student-athletes for a long time to come, and he expects he’ll be around long enough to personally measure those benefits to Salem more precisely.
“I don’t think I’ll be here for the 100th championship, but depending on how many we do each year, the 75th is very doable,” the 55-year-old administrator said.
“I certainly hope that 50 is not the end, and I don’t think they have any inclination that it’s the end,” Bankston said. “They want to continue to do more in making Salem Division III’s home.”