Sports Arena Loses Out to a Casino

Tuesday, March 11, 2008|News item: The Occident Seashore Conference, seeking a neutral land site for its men's and women's basketball game tournaments, is moving the 2009 titles to Las Vegas at the Orleans Hotel and Casino.

Old news item: The San Diego Sports Arena, once a topographic point of civic pridefulness that was worthy of hosting the 1975 NCAA Final Four, stays San Diego's municipal arena, even though it is devoid of events it was built to house.

Uncle Tom Shanahan

What make the two points have got to make with each other? Plenty, and to exemplify my point, I'm throwing Gonzaga University basketball game manager Mark Few into the story.Few is the manager of the national powerfulness from the Pacific Ocean Northwestern United States that campaigned the loudest and longer for the WCC tourneys to be moved off WCC campuses to a neutral site.He, and other WCC coaches, desire to take away the homecourt advantage that the University of San Diego's men's and women's squads capitalized on the past hebdomad during a successful tourney on the flooring and at the WCC ticket office."I'm proud the conference finally figured out what the managers wanted for the last 18 or 19 years," Few said. "If you hit them hard over the caput enough times, they finally calculate it out."

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Where was Few when we needed him in San Diego? Or at least person like the forward-thinking coach.Maybe helium was the cat we needed to nudge short-sighted city leadership and a paranoid public into recognizing the value of edifice a modern sphere to replace the obsolete Sports Arena.If such as a civic gem existed, San Diego's municipal sphere would be the yearly place of the WCC tournament. In the Hunt for a neutral site, WCC functionaries considered the Sports Sphere since it's not USD's place court.Few and other managers would have got viewed such as a move to San Diego and the Sports Sphere as less than ideal but acceptable and certainly better than the position quo.

But upon touring the Sports Arena, WCC functionaries dismissed the idea. They painted a harsh, awful verbal description of the edifice and said it was inadequate."San Diego is a great metropolis in its ain right," WCC commissioner Michael Gilleran said. "But if we travel to San Diego, we have got a first-class facility right here (USD's William Le Baron Jenny Craig Pavilion) that is cheaper and well staffed. We didn't experience it was the right thing to make to draw the gun trigger (and move to the Sports Arena)."We wanted to throw out for something that we were in love with. We didn't desire to settle. With the Orleans, we're not settling."Whether the WCC should be playing its pavilion basketball game event in a metropolis known for gaming and frailties and a state with no member schools is another debate.The point I'm making is see all the events San Diego could have got made money off in the recent past times had a modern sphere been built.

There are people out there that volition state you, yeah, but San Diego isn't a basketball game town. The NBA, with the Rockets and Clippers, both moved away. But they don't cognize the full story.The Rockets were victims of struggle between the metropolis and the franchise over rent, direction of the Sports Sphere and other issues that drove the squad away.

The Clipper were victims of Donald Sterling running play the franchise into the land so he had an alibi to travel the squad to Los Angeles.So the WCC skipped San Diego in favour of hotel and gambling casino sphere in Las Vegas. With no professional basketball game game in Las Vegas, the Orleans also hosts college invitationals in November and December that characteristic the greatest name calling in the game -- Kentucky, Sunflower State and other schools with fans who travel.Next year's WCC tourney will be sandwiched between three consecutive hebdomads of basketball tournaments. The Silver State state high school tourney will predate the WCC and the Mountain Occident Conference will follow the WCC.

Hey, maybe one of San Diego County's Indian gambling casinos should construct a basketball game sphere and fill up the void.Tom Shanahan is 's features columnist. He is the mass media coordinator for the San Diego Hallway of Champions and an occasional author for . You can e-mail him at . Or