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UD legend leading way for First Four sellout initiative

Jim Witmer Judy Dodge, Montgomery County Commissioner, is a member of the local organizing committee of the First Four/big Hoopla.

ENLARGE PHOTO

By Tom Archdeacon, Staff Writer Updated 1:04 AM Thursday, January 19, 2012

Don Donoher always was a master at putting together a scouting report, and Wednesday was no exception.

He sat in one of the empty suites at the top of UD Arena as the Local Organizing Committee of the First Four met just beyond the door in the Boesch Lounge. The group of some 40 local business leaders, politicians and representatives from the University of Dayton, Wright State and Wright Patterson Air Force Base were mapping out strategies to help sell out the opening four games of the NCAA tournament March 13 and 14 at the arena.

“This committee is knocking itself out to build things up around the First Four and sell this place out,” Donoher said. “The idea is to show the rest of the country what we already know — Dayton is a great basketball town. And when we impress that again on the hierarchy of the NCAA we can get this tournament here on a permanent basis.

“It would give Dayton something really special. For a couple of days, we’d get a national spotlight like we don’t often get. That’s why this bunch is doing everything it can.”

Among other things, Wednesday:

• The group unveiled plans for “The Big Hoopla,” a gala street party complete with a 5K race, bands, games and big-screen TVs.

It will take place in the Oregon District on Selection Sunday, the day the NCAA tournament field, including the eight teams coming to Dayton, is announced.

• Joe Lunardi, the ESPN college basketball analyst and NCAA tournament savant who was in town to speak to the Agonis Club, taped several TV and YouTube promos hyping the First Four in Dayton.

• Donoher was called to duty to serve as a spokesman for the event. He’s the best-known basketball name in Miami Valley history and certainly is more familiar with the NCAA tournament than anyone else here.

He played in the event when he was one of Tom Blackburn’s charges in 1952, and then when he became the Flyers coach, he took eight different teams to the tournament, including the 1967 Flyers who played in the NCAA championship game.

His tournament successes helped build the arena in the late 1960s, expand it after the run to the Elite Eight in 1984 and, in total, helped cement Dayton’s love affair with college hoops, an embrace that has been instrumental in the arena hosting more NCAA tournament games than any national venue.

The First Four, though, is about more than basketball here.

“The NCAA tournament has gotten to be such an unbelievably big event,” Donoher said. “Everybody and his brother around the nation fills out a bracket and enters some kind of pool. That gets everybody following it and when they do, the first thing they now see is Dayton.”

Montgomery County Commissioner and organizing committee member Judy Dodge agreed:

“The First Four is becoming an economic driver not just for Montgomery County, but the whole region. Dayton has had some blows over the past several years, but this is just such a positive, upbeat thing for this area.

“And like we keep saying, this is a basketball-crazy town.”

You saw that wherever you looked Wednesday, be it the disparate collection of folks on the organizing committee, or out into the lit-up arena, where workers prepared for Saturday’s sellout crowd and national TV audience that will watch UD and Xavier renew their heated 92-year-old rivalry, or even in that suite where Donoher sat.

On the wall were some old framed photographs from the Flyers’ run to the national title game against UCLA in 1967. One was a postgame shot after UD had beaten Virginia Tech in overtime at Magaw Hall in Evanston, Ill., to advance to the Final Four.

The UD crowd had mobbed the court. Donnie May was riding on the shoulders of fans and from one of the rims — which was being raised to the rafters — a UD cheerleader hung by one of his arms.

It was Jack Hoeft, who in later years would be on UD’s Board of Trustees.

UD hosted each of the NCAA tournament’s opening-round games — they began in 2001 — and then put on last year’s inaugural First Four, which drew 10,901 people per night.

After last year’s tournament, NCAA officials awarded the event to the arena for two more years. The 2014 First Four site will be up for bids this spring, and Tim O’Connell, the senior associate director of athletics at UD and the man who runs the tournaments at the arena, said this time Dayton will have competition.

“We need to sell the arena out this time to cement our situation,” he said.

At present nearly 10,000 tickets have been sold. To fill the Arena, another 2,500 or so must be purchased. To watch all four games from the lower arena costs $120. Upper arena seats are $80. They can be purchased at www.daytonflyers.com.

The NCAA is enamored enough of this place that next year the arena also hosts second- and third-round games in addition to the First Four.

“That’s 10 NCAA tournament games in five days,” Lunardi told the Agonis Club. “I don’t know about you guys, but at my age that’s better than sex — and it certainly lasts longer.”

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