This year’s Boys’ Sweet 16 basketball tournament one of least attended in event’s history
The 2025 UK Healthcare Boys’ Basketball Sweet 16 at Rupp Arena ranked as one of the least attended boys state tournaments since the Kentucky High School Athletic Association began tracking crowds in 1938.
Saturday night’s draw of 12,222 fans that saw Great Crossing defeat Bowling Green 71-61 brought the Sweet 16’s four-day total attendance to 88,386, the third smallest non-COVID-19 impacted total since the event moved exclusively to Rupp Arena in 1995.
This year’s figure ranked as the sixth-least attended event since 1957 when Freedom Hall in Louisville, with its more modern single-game capacity of around 18,000, became one of the Sweet 16’s alternating venues. Overall, including when the tournament was held at smaller gyms like Memorial Coliseum and Louisville’s Armory, it ranks 66th out of the 87 tournaments held since 1938.
KHSAA commissioner Julian Tackett attributed this year’s low total to the necessity of moving the tournament a week later on the calendar to accommodate Rupp Arena’s conflicting dates with a portion of the NCAA Tournament. That extra week pushed the Boys’ Sweet 16 on top of and adjacent to a number of spring breaks for schools across the state, including many of the schools with teams in the tournament.
“A whole bunch of this is spring break,” Tackett said ahead of Saturday’s championship game. “You saw teams (drawing) real well Wednesday here, but by the time they played again Friday they didn’t have anybody here.”
Wednesday’s evening session drew just 9,007 fans, marking the least attended session of the week and one of the poorest attended sessions since the KHSAA began announcing them in 1978. That session included Danville Christian, a school with an enrollment of only 78 students, and western Kentucky’s Calloway County, whose fans faced a 260-mile drive for an 8:30 p.m. EDT tipoff.
Friday’s evening session, which included North Laurel against Montgomery County and Great Crossing against Cooper, conflicted with the University of Kentucky’s NCAA Tournament game against Tennessee. Though that session drew 11,011 fans, Friday night games typically draw more. In 2023, the Friday evening session drew 14,173 to see Frederick Douglass against Male and Lyon County against George Rogers Clark.
“On outdoor sports, it’s weather, matchups and timing. And on indoor sports, it’s matchups and timing,” Tackett said. “So, it just depends on who gets in.”
But as Tackett said, who makes the tournament and who makes the championship game can be a significant factor in how well attended the event will be.
The least attended Boys’ Sweet 16 at Rupp Arena came in 2022 when 83,689 turned out for what culminated in George Rogers Clark’s championship win against Warren Central. That tournament still had lingering effects from the previous year’s COVID-19 restrictions, which included the end of selling general admission tickets per two-game session. Now, tickets are sold only as reserved seats for individual games.
The next-least attended tournament came in 2016 and featured some of the state’s smallest schools, including Buckhorn, Murray and Newport Central Catholic. It also had a championship game between two city schools, Lexington’s Paul Laurence Dunbar and Louisville’s Doss. Dunbar’s championship game win that year drew 10,091 fans, more than 2,000 fewer than this year’s finals.
In making Tackett’s point about matchups, last year’s Boys’ Sweet 16, featuring future University of Kentucky players Travis Perry of Lyon County and Trent Noah of Harlan County, drew 99,915 fans, the closest the event has come to topping the 100,000 mark in a decade. Noah had been committed to South Carolina at that time, but he still had a considerable following as one of Kentucky’s most prolific scorers.
The state tournament has not topped 100,000 in total attendance since 2014. Prior to that, six-figure Sweet 16 crowds were the norm, occurring for 12 years straight and 41 of the previous 50 years dating to 1965.
This story was originally published April 1, 2025 at 6:39 PM.
