The Atlantic Coast Conference will return its men’s basketball tournament to its most historic venue in 2023, the league announced on Tuesday, after the 2020 ACC Tournament in Greensboro, North Carolina was canceled amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The historic Greensboro Coliseum hosted the first two days of the 2020 event before it was canceled. Greensboro will now get another chance to host the tournament in 2023. The Coliseum has hosted the tournament 27 times.
“The partnership between the ACC and the city of Greensboro is extremely special, and one that has spanned nearly seven decades,” ACC commissioner John Swofford said in a press release. “The decision to bring the ACC Men’s Basketball Tournament back to the Greensboro Coliseum was the right thing to do and we look forward to returning in 2023.”
The ACC is headquartered in Greensboro, and many consider the Coliseum the conference’s historic home.
“It has supported the Atlantic Coast Conference from the very beginning 1953, when the ACC was founded here,” Swofford said. “It’s hosted more men’s basketball, more women’s basketball tournaments, in the ACC, than any other venue. It does it with class and dignity and extremely warm hospitality. It’s simply a great venue to have an event.”
The ACC Tournament had previously been scheduled for Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C. in 2021 and Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York in 2023 as part of a four-year schedule rotation that also included a stop in Charlotte, North Carolina in 2019.
With the Greensboro stop being re-scheduled to 2023, any decisions on the future sites of the tournament will not be made until the 2024 season. Swofford was non-committal about the future of the process.
“Our athletic directors will continue to discuss future tournaments,” Swofford said. “We’re in a rotation in which we’ve been to Washington, Brooklyn, Charlotte, Greensboro. On occasion, we’ve been to Atlanta. We’ve been to Florida on one occasion. I think we’re in a good rotation and in a good place. We’re fortunate because we have a great tournament, tremendous history, great tradition and a lot of venues, a lot of cities welcome having it. It’s successful wherever it goes.”
You can solidly count Pitt head coach Jeff Capel among those that think keeping Greensboro in the conference’s rotation is important, given the historic nature of the venue.
“You think of the greats of college basketball, they played in [the Coliseum],” Capel said at the 2020 ACC Tournament. “This state loves basketball and they love the ACC. And you know, anytime you play here there’s going to be passion in the building, there’s going to be excitement, there’s going to be people and there’s going to be people that just love basketball. Certainly they have allegiance to their team, but they love basketball.”
