Girls’ Sweet Sixteen attendance way up at Rupp Arena. Will title sponsor step up next?
By most measures the first KHSAA Girls’ Sweet Sixteen held at Rupp Arena was a success.
The tournament produced a first-time champion out of a title game featuring two debut finalists. A lot of people turned out to watch the games — 40,851, which was the second-highest figure for a girls’ state tournament behind only the 43,406 that came to watch the 2011 tournament at E.A. Diddle Arena in Bowling Green.
“Certainly the following for some of these teams was amazing,” KHSAA Commissioner Julian Tackett said. “And that kind of was the hope. Now we’ll see if it can grow.”
No single-session attendance record was broken but all eight sessions would have placed inside the top 15 compared to previous years. The most well-attended session was the third first-round grouping, which saw 5,745 fans come out to see Barren County defeat Pikeville and Male overcome Boyd County.
Ryle Coach Katie Haitz was initially concerned that the bigger arena would be an issue.
“But this has been just unbelievable,” Haitz said. “I think it’s great centrally located, it allowed more people to come and feel like they could come and it wasn’t such a far drive.”
Rupp’s mystique appealed to the girls as much as it has to the boys over the last few decades.
“It’s definitely different. I think just the intensity, really walking in,” said Juliet McGregor, a senior for Ryle, this year’s champion. “There’s just some kind of, I don’t know what you call it, but since it’s Rupp Arena and you know UK obviously is one of the biggest stages ever, it’s such an honor to play here.”
McGregor played for Ryle in last year’s Sweet Sixteen, the third straight played at NKU’s BB&T Arena before it moved to Lexington for the first time since 1932. The last tournament in northern Kentucky drew only 29,843 fans, the lowest amount since 2009.
“NKU, we definitely play a lot more comfortable there and I think this is something where we really had to step outside of our comfort zone and play on a bigger stage,” McGregor said. “I think it really helped us.”
It wasn’t just current players who were in awe.
“What was most pleasing to me was to see some of the former players who were here from past years who never got a chance to play here, just in awe,” Tackett said. “And saying, ‘Man, it would have been so cool.’”
Southwestern Coach Stephen Butcher, whose team fell to Ryle in the finals, coached Pike County Central to the 2007 finals at Diddle Arena.
“They were a little more lax about restricted areas and that kind of thing, so I was kind of surprised. They treated it just like they do the boys, ‘You gotta have this credential to go here,’ and that’s great,” Butcher said.
The KHSAA was unable to secure a title sponsor for this year’s tournament. Butcher called that a “smack in the face.”
“We deserve a title sponsor,” Butcher said. “… Those things, they’ll work themselves out eventually, but there’s no reason the girls shouldn’t play here.”
The girls’ Sweet Sixteen is tentatively scheduled to be held at Rupp Arena through 2022, but the KHSAA has said it could revisit that placement after 2020 if no title sponsor comes into the picture.
“It’s a huge risk, because we have facility fees and bond fees that we pay on every ticket sold that, part of the purpose of the sponsor, is to get that,” Tackett said. “It’s time for somebody to step up and support these girls and make sure that it can stay in a place where it can grow.”
This story was originally published March 17, 2019 at 4:52 PM.