For the longest time, the Atlantic-10 Conference has been an East Coast league dominated by East Coast schools with an apparent East Coast bias. And who can blame them. With three schools alone in the Philadelphia area (Temple, St. Joseph’s, and LaSalle), along with everyone else besides Xavier, Dayton, and to a lesser extent Duquesne, the epicenter of the league is somewhere within a short drive of the Atlantic Ocean or a thick east coast accent. Perhaps that’s where the name comes from.

Member institutions aside, many leagues call home wherever their main offices are, and Philadelphia once again takes center stage. A major metropolitan city with a huge media market, the City of Brotherly Love looks like the perfect place to sell the Atlantic-10 to the masses. Basketball, like most conferences not affiliated with the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) of college football, is center stage, promoting each team member and paying the bills for other Tier-1 and Tier-2 sports at the college level. In most cases, when Atlantic-10 basketball is doing well, it throws out an umbrella of respect among all schools and among all sports within the conference. Putting a good foot forward on the basketball court goes a long way.

Winning earns respect, but wins alone are not enough. Conference likes the MAC, Horizon League, West Coast Conference, and others routinely put forth top-notch basketball programs that win 20 games a season, knock off Top-25 opponents, and make heads turn on Selection Sunday. Yet respect continues to be a never-ending battle of perception and reality.

The A-10 is not unlike many of these conferences. While most handicappers put the A-10 in line with the top non-BCS conferences in the country like the Mountain West and C-USA, the gap between us and the “mid-majors” is not a lot after the top and bottom teams of the league are thrown out. Unlike the mid-majors however, the A-10 has more brand recognition and schools like Temple, UMass, Xavier, and more recently St. Joseph’s and Dayton help lend credibility despite the wins and losses. But it’s not a full sail, and having a league buried in the same part of the country as the Big East is something the league constantly fights. Small gymnasiums among more than half of the league members perpetuates a stereotype that the A-10 is a “small-time”, “wannabe”, “poser”, among the big boys, hoping to overachieve every year and silence the critics.

What all of this means is the Atlantic-10 has few opportunities to sell the conference on a national scale, but when those times come, they must seize the opportunity to put the league in the best possible light. As March rolls around every year, postseason conference tournaments heat up and national exposure is there for the taking. The A-10 has elected to keep the conference tournament in Philadelphia for several years now in the hope of exploiting these circumstances. There’s no mistaking the population and television audience of a city the size of Philadelphia, but there’s a growing concern among schools inside and outside the nerve center that Philadelphia is dropping the ball at the most important time of the season. For several years, the tournament has been mired in sluggish attendance, poor facilities, inadequate management and oversight, and an all-too-often condition of keeping with the status quo rather than listening to alternatives.

It’s really no secret. Conference Commissioner Linda Bruno and her posse realize that moving the tournament to another location, let alone somewhere outside the East Coast, as an admission of guilt. To do so would acknowledge publicly the failed policies of the past and, to a certain extent, point blame on each other as the ultimate decision-makers in the inability to make Philadelphia a deserving host of the postseason conference tournament.

For a league driving hard to exact as much credibility as they can, the placement of the postseason basketball tournament is very important. Bruno knows it’s a chance to get many league members on national television as well as give each institution an opportunity to sell their university to the masses. While the product on the basketball floor is important, just as important is the perception that people care about the conference to begin with – especially those closest to it. Over the last five to seven years, A-10 member schools have taken care of the winning part. Temple, UMass, Rhode Island, and St. Joseph’s have all made it to the Sweet Sixteen or better in the last five seasons, and schools like Xavier, Dayton, Geo. Washington, St. Bonaventure, and newly-appointed Richmond have fielded NCAA teams as well. In many ways, the A-10 has succeeded in spite of itself. When the A-10 Tournament rolls around every March however, Philadelphians turn a blind eye and show their disinterest. Were there no television and SportsCenter highlights, it might not mean a whole lot, but it does, and the image of a near-empty First Union Spectrum continues to hurt the league by sending the wrong message.

What’s ironic is that alternatives have been on the table for a couple of years now, but they’ve received little more than nibbles at the Monday morning board meeting. UD Director of Athletics Ted Kissell told UDPride last year that Dayton would guarantee the conference a minimum $500,000 profit were the tournament to be played at UD Arena. For a tournament currently struggling to break even, the A-10 said thanks but no thanks, and there are rumors that the guarantee is now closer to $1 million. What’s disheartening is the league’s treatment of Xavier and Dayton, schools who average nearly double the attendance of every other league member during the regular season. In truth, either university could support the A-10 Tournament much better than Philadelphia, but Dayton has the track record to prove it. Finally, a few brave souls in the A-10 office may be listening.

Quite simply, an empty house doesn’t sell on national television. Most armchair fans will turn the channel if the game doesn’t look important, and that’s exactly what it looks like when 850 hearty supporters speckle a 17,000 seat Arena. Fill the place up with 10,000 fans – or even a packed gym of 4,000 – and people take their hand off the remote control to see what they’re missing. The Univ. Dayton and the staff at the UD Arena have the wherewithal to make it happen, provided the league lets them do so in the first place.

Talk is cheap however and facts speak for themselves. While Dayton and the UD Arena has hosted more NCAA games than all other venues except Madison Square Garden, Memorial Coliseum, and the Jon Huntsman Center, the Flyers have also been host to three postseason tournaments. The former MCC (now Horizon League), played to record crowds in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and to this day the conference hasn’t come close to breaking them.

But watching Dayton play Xavier at 8pm and watching Loyola (IL) battle Butler at 1pm on a Friday afternoon at noon are two different extremes – or so one might think. In fact, there’s nothing extreme about it. I asked Greg Weitekamp of the Horizon League office to supply the attendance figures for each year Dayton hosted the MCC Tournament – including every session of every day. The numbers speak for themselves:

1989 Tournament –
Session 1 (Quarterfinals) – 10,057
Session 3 (Semifinals) -11,238
Session 4 (Championship) – 11,180

Three Day/Three Session Total – 33,475
Tournament Average – 11,158

1990 Tournament –
Session 1 (Quarterfinals) – 11,199
Session 2 (Quarterfinals) – 10,631
Session 3 (Semifinals) – 13,202 (Capacity, League Record)
Session 4 (Championship) -13,202 (Capacity, League Record)

Three Day/ Four Session Total – 48,234 (League Record)
Tournament Average – 12,059 (League Record)

1991 Tournament –
Session 1 (Quarterfinals) – 11,264
Session 2 (Quarterfinals) – 10,426
Session 3 (Semifinals) – 12,213
Session 4 (Championship) -11,596

Three Day/ Four Session Total – 45,499
Tournament Average – 11,375

Without question, little did it matter when the Flyers played. Fans flocked through the turnstiles en masse and called in sick at work to make the Friday afternoon games or found a babysitter to make all the evening sessions. Amazingly, Dayton never drew less than 10,000 fans to any session and sold out twice. While it’s true that former MCC members Evansville, Butler, and Xavier were short drives and helped ticket sales, only Xavier and Evansville ever brought enough fans to even mention the point. The rest of the seats were snapped up by locals. It’ would also true that the MCC, at the time, was ranked as high as eighth in the country in the power ratings. Evansville and Xavier were winning 23 games a year and Butler was tough as well, but the Atlantic-10 Conference as we now know it has much more resonance than the MCC ever had.

Let’s not get too myopic however. Dayton stood excellent chances of moving deep in the MCC Tournaments at the time and the league was a three-day event unlike the 12-team Atlantic-10 that uses a four-day schedule starting on Thursday. It’s also true that when the Flyers weren’t on the court, paid attendees and actual fans in the seats were a bit misleading as well. Session One matches on Friday typically had a slow but steady crowd that arrived late but stayed until the last match of the evening completed. Because tickets are usually sold by sessions and not by individual games, some fans elected to skip the other contest on their ticket before or after their own team hit the floor. Personal recollection tells me 6,000-7,000 fans were in the seats during Session One on Friday, while Dayton matches drew equal to their paid attendance. In 1989 and 1991 when the Flyers failed to make the Finals, attendance was stronger than Friday’s Session One, but somewhat less than the paid attendance figure would indicate.

None of this is surprising however and all postseason tournaments run into this phenomenon when many fans from many schools come together for a long weekend. The good news is attendees and those who missed a game or two on their ticket were random, giving the UD Arena a feel of being full as empty seats were sprinkled evenly throughout instead of a large wing of the concourse going unused.

No matter what figures you throw at the argument however, attendance at the First Union Spectrum in Philadelphia cannot compete. I attended the 1999 A-10 Tournament to watch a quarterfinal game on Friday afternoon between Dayton and hometown team St. Joseph’s in the company of 750 fans inside a 17,000-seat facility – a facility so well aware that Philadelphia is uninterested that they curtained off half of the upper deck. One can only imagine what the actual attendance figures were on Thursday for first round matches – especially those without a local team in the mix. Saturday night’s semifinal pitting Dayton and St. Bonaventure drew perhaps 1,500 brave souls. A match involving Temple, the hometown favorite and national power, drew slightly more than double that same evening. No matter, I had plenty of empty seats in the second row of the First Union Spectrum to choose from and sat behind the benches every time.

If the Univ. Dayton wants to do what Philadelphia and the A-10 cannot do on their own however, it must do more than simply sell tickets. Perhaps most important if given the chance, UD officials must elevate the tournament and make everyone involved in it – from players to coaches to fans to the media – expect the highest standards at every turn. Over the last 30 years, the Dayton tournament organizers have mastered the art of perfecting the fine details and treating everyone to the red carpet. For the second year in a row, the NCAA Play-In game will reside in Dayton and not Rupp Arena, Phog Allen Fieldhouse, Pauley Pavillion, Bud Walton Arena, or any number of other world-famous venues.

To provide a fair argument, requests were made to the Atlantic-10 headquarters to supply attendance figures for each session in the last four years of the conference tournament held in Philadelphia, but those requests went unanswered. Perhaps the A-10 was too busy to provide them, or perhaps they were too ashamed to?

With no hard numbers to go on, firsthand eyeball estimates are the best I can do and those have been provided.

When all of these factors get weighed, it’s easy to see why the conference is looking at alternatives. But why has it taken them so long? Power conferences like the Big East, ACC, Big-10, and Big-12 play their tournaments on neutral courts and have little problem filling the seats. The A-10 however is different. Outside of UMass, Temple, and Rhode Island, most of the schools are smaller than many branch campuses from those BCS institutions. The A-10 has as much in common with the Big East as it does the PAC-10. Instead of trying to be like Big Brother, it’s time to forge our own identity and do things according to how well they benefit the league members, not how those outside the league might perceive them. It’s time to exploit the Flyer basketball support, exploit historic venues like Rose Hill Gym, exploit the league’s “play anyone, anywhere, anytime” mentality. Collectively, the Atlantic-10 has incredible selling points among each institution, but unless we use them, what good are they? There are many examples, but the A-10 Tournament is just one. We’ve been exploiting the warts and not the beauty marks, so it’s time to make a change.