City of Richmond extending contract with CAA to 2014
Mayor Jones announced today that the City of Richmond will extend its existing contract with the CAA tournament to 2014 with an option to renew for two more years provided the City meets “expectations.” The previous contract was set to expire in 2012.
Mayor Jones announced today that the City of Richmond will extend its existing contract with the CAA tournament to 2014 with an option to renew for two more years provided the City meets “expectations.” The previous contract was set to expire in 2012.
What are the expectations? It sounded like the additional extension (2015-2016) hinged on the progress made by the City to find a replacement for The Coliseum — the results of the committee/consultants currently working up a plan were mentioned several times. It seems like the 2014 extension was made in good faith that we’ll have a solution ready — maybe not implemented — to “The Coliseum Problem,” along with two million dollars worth of minor improvements made / being made to the Coliseum.
The loss of the CAA Tournament, while being a huge bummer, would also lose the region $5.8 million in “stimulus.” Consider: last year’s tournament brought 43,000 people into downtown over four days and showcased Richmond in five of the top nine media markets. Plus, believe me, it is super fun.
The CAA Tournament has been hosted in Richmond for 21 years and it is the second longest venue/event relationship behind the Big East and Madison Square Garden.
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Ross Catrow
Founder and publisher of RVANews.
Notice: Comments that are not conducive to an interesting and thoughtful conversation may be removed at the editor’s discretion.
Did Yeager comment or acknowledge other schools issues with RC as a venue? Did he mention if there has there been a good faith effort to find other venues?
Bummer for CAA fans. I love the CAA tourney and hate the Coliseum and surrounding area. I wish they’d move it to Norfolk, Charlottesville or Baltimore. It’d be nice to visit different cities and see what they have to offer.
@Mike Do you mean a venue outside of Richmond? Or a new venue to replace the Coliseum? The Mayor mentioned that the deal was not a “slam dunk” and required a lot of effort on the City’s part to get it inked. No one talked about whether they had other cities in mind.
@ Ross.. Well I think your on the right track with the premise of this deal being we’ll give RVA two years to get your stuff together if not we’ll leave.
Yeager has made some noise in the last year saying the facilities are not up to snuff but if you are going to have this presser I dont understand why not explicitly say
” we love being in the city of richmond, but on behalf of our membership we know there are concerns with our membership with RC as a venue and if the city does not make a good faith effort to meet those expectations make no mistake we will leave.”
That way I think you alleviate some of the pressure coming from the northern members. Simply to say well we have expectations to be met without laying out those expectations is silly, vague and doesn’t mean anything to people with major concerns about RVA for the CAA tourney. In fact it only gives people more faith that this is a southern conference in it’s core not a regional one.
I think from the northern school’s perspective the fact that they extended the deal without looking at other bid’s is unfortunate. Don’t get me wrong I get why richmond works, but make no mistake about it there are very sound reasons why it’s not “neutral site” and that other locations should get a very strong look.