Women's NIT College Basketball Coming to Fort Worth: Few Fans Allowed, Small Arena, No Party. But it Could All Add Up Anyway

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Fort Worth will play host March 19-22 to a regional bracket of the Women’s NIT – a 10-game tournament featuring eight Division 1 college basketball teams. The teams will stay downtown. Restaurants will see additional foot traffic. The city will see national exposure from live streams of the games.

Outside of that, owing to COVID-19, the tournament will keep a decidedly low profile. The games will be played at the Fort Worth Independent School District’s Wilkerson-Greines Activity Center on the city’s Southeast side, a 4,759-seat venue that hosts school district events like basketball and volleyball games and graduations. Each team – the field will be chosen March 15 – gets a limited number of tickets to distribute to family members and others, but admission probably won’t be available to the public. There’ll be no opportunities for fans to interact with the teams. The games won’t be shown over a major sports network, as is usual. Rather, they’ll be streamed online over the FloHoops basketball network. The Fort Worth Sports Commission – a division of the Visit Fort Worth tourism bureau - estimates economic impact will include $200,000 in direct spending, including more than 700 hotel rooms booked.

The privately-owned WNIT and Fort Worth Sports Commission, a division of the Visit Fort Worth tourism bureau, view this year’s tournament as a way to reward the teams and gain exposure for Fort Worth and the three other cities hosting regional brackets. Fort Worth recently was awarded the NCAA’s Women’s 2026 Super Regional Division 1 playoff bracket, to be played at the new Dickies Arena, which seats 13,300 for basketball and has already been booked for numerous major sporting events in the coming years. Visit Fort Worth has estimated the NCAA Women's bracket will generate $2.8 million in economic impact for the city.

When the Women's NIT went out to bid this year on a tournament with limited scope, Fort Worth pitched itself.

“We saw this as an opportunity,” Jason Sands, the commission’s director, said in an interview. “We’re very active in sports. We think Fort Worth will be a great home for women’s basketball. We’ve got a good partnership with the Fort Worth ISD. This will be a perfect fit for what we’re doing.”

Besides Fort Worth, the WNIT is holding the three other eight-team regional brackets in Rockford, Ill., Charlotte, N.C., and Memphis, Tenn. The WNIT will announce the field after the field for the NCAA Women’s Division 1 tournament has been chosen on March 15.

The WNIT’s Round 1 games are March 19, the second games March 20, and third round March 22. The winner of the Fort Worth tournament will advance to the WNIT’s final four and championship game at a site to be announced. Teams that lose in Round 1 will move to a consolation bracket, with those games played March 20 and 22.

How does the WNIT make money on the tournament?

Typically, Triple Crown Sports, a family-owned company in Fort Collins, Colo., that owns the Women’s NIT and has produced events in youth and collegiate sports for more than 35 years, has a 64-team tournament.

The Women’s NIT positions itself as a postseason opportunity for teams that missed the NCAA tournament, and to ones that may be building up to better seasons. Arizona, Indiana and Michigan have won the last three Women’s NITs.

Attendance typically builds during the brackets, Renee Carlson, executive director of the tournament, said. Arizona won the 2019 tournament – COVID forced the cancellation of last year’s – before 14,644 fans on its home court in Tucson.

“They end up with record sellouts,” Carlson said. “That’s normally the MO for the Womens’ NIT. Let’s been in communities where we can grow the sport.”

The schools typically pay a game guarantee to the tournament to host games. “If they draw a lot of fans, then once their expenses are covered, we revenue-share in some of the gate revenue,” Carlson said. “We give some of the money to the visiting teams to help offset their travel expenses.”

This year, the tournament chose “neutral” sites, when it determined recruiting host schools would be difficult. 

“We knew it was going to be a challenge to get universities to open up for games on campus,” Carlson said. “We knew it would be a challenge to find space. The university people are really, really tapped out to the extremes as far as staffing.”

The Women’s NIT also cut the 2021 field in half. Each team will pay a “minimal game fee for every game they play in,” Carlson said. “We use that money to cover our costs for game officials, facility, staff, scorer’s table staff, streaming costs, game (operations), signage, and COVID testing cost for game officials and staff.”

The school district is charging Triple Crown a flat $20,000 for use of Wilkerson-Greines during the regional bracket, Clint Bond, school district spokesman, said. The tournament would pay another flat $10,000 if it chose Wilkerson-Greines to host the championship games.

With no gate, “the goal is to break even and not lose money,” Carlson said. “We wanted to give teams an opportunity to play this year, without putting our family-owned business in jeopardy of falling in the red. That is why the support and partnership of CVBs such as Visit Fort Worth and the local community and school district is so important in partnering together to make this happen.”

When asked if Visit Fort Worth is providing financial incentives to Triple Crown, Sands declined to say. “As you can imagine, this is a highly competitive industry, and out of respect for our customers as well as our partners, final negotiations with clients like the WNIT are confidential,” he said.

Even with the limited potential of this tournament by itself, “all of these events help put hospitality workers back to work,” Sands said, and position the city as a host of sporting events, with a range of venues, hotel rooms, and attractions.

“Anytime we can bring universities and their athletic programs to Fort Worth to show off what they have to offer, that’s a win for us,” Sands said. “It sets us up for success down the road. Our goal is to make sure it’s a safe and responsible situation for everybody. Hopefully, they’ll remember that when they can pack the place with 5,000, 10,000 people.”