After months of angst about whether or not North Carolina would be considered for future NCAA hosting duties due to House Bill 2, several states were among those selected on Tuesday afternoon.Following the repeal of H.B. 2 in late March, the NCAA announced it would consider N.C. again for future hosting dates. On Tuesday, multiple cities including Raleigh, Greensboro and Cary were on the list of hosts for NCAA Championships, including two NCAA March Madness bids.”Normally we would have started making decisions about site locations actually months ago,” NCAA president Mark Emmert told reporters during the Final Four in Phoenix. “We worked with all of our sports committees to be able to extend those decisions as far as we could. We’ve reached a place where they actually need to start making those decisions they’ve been meeting this week and they’ll be meeting next week as well because we start losing sites.”Greensboro, after losing its hosting duties in 2017, was selected to host the first and second rounds in 2020. Raleigh will host the following season in 2021, along with five other on-site hosting duties for NC State including women’s gymnastics regionals and women’s swimming and diving championships from 2020 to 2022.Another site that came out a winner, despite not being listed by the NCAA on future hosting sites, was Charlotte. The city retains its bid for the first and second-round hosting duties for 2018 following the repeal of H.B. 2.”We are actively determining site selections, and this new law has minimally achieved a situation where we believe NCAA championships may be conducted in a nondiscriminatory environment,” the NCAA Board of Governors stated in a release earlier this month. “If we find that our expectations of a discrimination-free environment are not met, we will not hesitate to take necessary action at any time.”Along with the March Madness dates returning to N.C., the NCAA also approved several dates in Cary, including the D-II World Series from 2019-22, men’s soccer College Cup in 2019 and 2021 and women’s soccer College Cup in 2018 and 2020.In total, N.C. will host 23 NCAA Championship events from 2019 through 2022. Of those, 10 will be from Division I, five from Division II and eight from Division III.”We’re pleased the NCAA is bringing championship play back to North Carolina and we eagerly await the return of these games,” UNC President Margaret Spelling said in a statement. “These events are great opportunities to showcase remarkable student athletes, provide an arena for fans to celebrate our state’s proud tradition of collegiate sports, and spur economic activity across our communities and the state. And we continue to applaud our elected leaders for recent efforts to make this opportunity possible.”Prior being stripped of its NCAA March Madness hosting duties in 2017, N.C. had hosted the opening rounds in 11 of the previous 13 seasons. Following Tuesday’s announcement, it will now host in three of the next five years.In addition to the North Carolina announcement, the NCAA announced that Dayton would continue to host the First Four through at least 2022.The NCAA previously announced Final Four locations: San Antonio (2018), Minneapolis (2019), Atlanta (2020), Indianapolis (2021) and New Orleans (2022).
