NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — LeAnn Cox with Visit Hutch said that the new hotel project in Hutchinson is welcome, but until it's here, several teams that qualify for the NJCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament will be staying elsewhere.
"Unfortunately, this year, next month, coming up so soon, we will have nine teams staying in Sedgwick County, outside of our borders here, that's just the way it has to be," Cox said. "They will again do that in March of 2024. By the time they return for March of 2025, we will get six of those nine teams back into Hutchinson."
Cox said they try to place teams by their seeding so that teams that are expected to last longer in the tournament are the ones that are staying here in Hutch.
"That is simple math," Cox said. "Every year, something goes awry and that's not the case, but you've got to go with the odds, I guess."
The hope is that some of the hotels in town will be able to remodel to fill in the gap beyond what the new hotel can do.
"There is a piece of this that most people probably don't think about, that's the quality issue," Cox said. "NJCAA, like a lot of other associations that we deal with, they have, basically, a minimum standard of what a hotel needs to achieve before they allow one of their championship teams to be placed there. We have a couple of hotels that are right on the fringe, that we probably could use in the near future, if they make some upgrades and kind of achieve that level the NJCAA is looking for."
The NJCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship will begin Monday, March 20 in Hutchinson.
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