Men’s March Madness returned to Wichita for the first time since 2018 on March 20 and 22 at INTRUST Bank Arena. With it, Wichita State faculty and students came together behind the scenes to ensure everything ran smoothly.
Managing and helping run one of the nation’s largest sporting events is no small feat. Airwaves must stay consistent from coast to coast, the mornings start early, and the hours are endless. And after a week of work, it’s over.
At the end of it, you’ve bonded with the people you just worked with, in shifts that sometimes stretch 22 hours. By 3 a.m., everyone is belly laughing with each other like a close-knit family. Time itself seems to vanish.
“It’s so much fun that sometimes you forget about the long hours,” said Mike Ross, WSU graduate coordinator of sport and leadership studies and assistant professor.
Ross was the games’ host media coordinator. He had several tasks, from approving media credentials to acting as the liaison to CBS, which hosts the Big Dance.
Planning stage
According to Brad Pittman, WSU’s senior associate athletic director of Facilities and Operations and an adjunct teacher on campus, putting the materials together for a venue bid happens months before the request is submitted. The bid is then sent “four to five years in advance” of when a city can host games.
Pittman served as the tournament manager for the Wichita Regional and oversaw the entire operation from top to bottom.
The competition for obtaining a bid is fierce. Pittman said Wichita submitted its bid five years ago.
The financial aspect of the tournament provides another reason for the competitiveness. Pittman doesn’t have the full data yet but estimated the economic impact in Wichita from the tournament will be $5 to $8 million. Because WSU played its role, some income will flow to campus.
Pittman stressed the need to perform well as a host because getting a bid isn’t just “put your name in the hat and you get it.”
“These are prestigious events,” Pittman said. “… Between first, second round, regionals and the Final Four, there’s only 13 cities in America that host the men’s basketball event.”
After the bid is awarded, there is a little lull, and another 12-18 months is allotted for planning. This ensures enough time is in place to limit people from scrambling when the tournament rolls around.
Pittman said a lot of this time is spent maintaining prior contacts and seeing how other venues run events like this. Then, people need to be hired to help run it as smoothly as possible.
“It isn’t just a couple folks that make this work,” Pittman said. “There was literally probably over 150 volunteers that made this engine go.”
Roughly 50 of the volunteers are WSU students.
Once volunteers and staff are assembled, they’re divided into teams. Over a dozen teams of people worked as one to make March Madness work. Much like on the court, every role is significant.
“If they’re not managing their task, it creates a fire that then somebody has to deal with and put out,” Pittman said.
‘Vaults you into a different stratosphere’
It takes a certain commitment to work the NCAA’s men’s basketball tournament, especially as a college student on spring break. A student spends the longest break of the spring semester working, sometimes for lengthy hours, and has the willingness to show up each day.
Joel Ford, a junior sport management major, was there from 8 or 9 a.m. and didn’t leave until midnight on the first day of the games. He said he was kept busy until 5:30 p.m. that day and didn’t even realize what time it was until someone checked their phone.
“I’m like, ‘It does not feel like that at all,’” Ford said. “And then right around, like, 10 p.m., we started getting a little tired, started feeling like, ‘Okay, we can see how it’s 10 p.m. now.’”
The reliability Ford showed while volunteering is what Ross said he looks for most when recruiting people to join his staff, particularly with WSU volunteers. They also have to be willing to learn to run the tournament the right way.
“And a lot of that’s dictated by the NCAA,” Ross said. “A camera can’t record anything on court beyond the 60-minute mark of the countdown clock and things like that. So (I look for) people that can learn the rules and enforce them and basically help keep everything looking the way that it’s supposed to look.”
When Pittman hired staff and volunteers to his team, he said he looked for those who showed extra effort to put in the hours.
“I don’t necessarily care about experience … because you can teach people a lot of things,” Pittman said. “You cannot teach them passion and hunger and the other things that go with that.”
Despite the tournament’s demanding nature, Ross said the experience alone is a vital stepping stone for the students involved, given its vast popularity.
“This is probably a top-five event in the world,” Ross said. “You have the eyeballs of the entire world on you … Not everyone gets that opportunity. So it vaults you into a different stratosphere in terms of experience.”
Regardless of the area of interest, Pittman said, when students are allowed to help run an event like this, they should jump on the opportunity because it applies to many aspects, from working on a team to persevering through adversity.
“I think that experience is just completely invaluable,” Pittman said. “And that’s part of what we try to do — is get students an opportunity to be a part of that. Ultimately, that’s how I got my start in this industry and that’s how a lot of people do.”
The student experience
Pittman and Ross said volunteering at an event like March Madness for the first time is jaw-dropping for students. INTRUST Bank Arena seats over 15,000 people. On multiple occasions, nearly every seat was filled.
Tyler Winn was a WSU student who volunteered during the event. He is a senior majoring in sport management with a minor in communications. Winn had previously interned with the Wichita Thunder, a local minor-league hockey team, but said the difference in the size of crowds between the Thunder and the NCAA was crazy.
“Seeing those people enjoy basketball … was just amazing,” Winn said.
Winn checked teams into the venue and helped them with whatever they needed. He helped set up locker rooms after each game and even helped set up name plates for the postgame press conferences. Overall, he wanted to do whatever he could to help everything run correctly.
This was Winn’s first experience working at a large event like this at the collegiate level. He said it opened his eyes to how they’re run and the required professionalism that goes with it.
“That experience was really exciting to learn,” Winn said. “And just the experience of being around like-minded individuals with career roles in the sporting industry and just picking their brains and networking was truly something I enjoyed.”
Despite the large crowds, Pittman and Ross said once the students understood their roles, the feelings faded and they came out of their shells.
“The most rewarding part is to see that lightbulb come on for them and get it,” Ross said. “Like, ‘I am in the right place within this major and being able to do this, like, this is where I belong.’”
Ford worked the media side of the event and ran transcripts from the distribution center to the media rooms. He also delivered box scores to the media at halftime and at the end of games.
Ford said he jumped on the opportunity because of some conversations he had with his roommate and Ross.
“It was kind of something like a resume builder,” Ford said. “But it was also a kind of cool experience coming from a tiny town where it’s like you have to drive five hours to get to anything like that. I thought it was pretty cool to see and just be involved in it.”
Ford is from Phillipsburg, Kansas, a 3 ½ hour drive from Wichita. It has a population of roughly 2,500 people. He said the experience of being from a small town and volunteering for such a big event opened his eyes because, in a city as large as Wichita, he felt he was “one in a million.”
“You come in here and you have to really, like, fight for opportunities,” Ford said. “If you want to volunteer for something or be involved with something, you have to be able to stack up and be better than the people next to you.”
Kaori Buchanan, a freshman majoring in social work, volunteered during the tournament. Every member of WSU’s Spirit Squad, including Buchanan, volunteered.
Buchanan and the Spirit Squad were responsible for checking the teams, coaches, other schools’ Spirit Squads and bands into the venue and escorting them to various holding rooms and locker rooms before the start of each game. She said there was an extra sense of responsibility given the nature of the event.
“There’s confidential stuff that happens that, like, you can’t say,” Buchanan said about behind-the-scenes work. “And so, just keeping that in mind, like, you’re here to work and not just have this fun experience.”
Before majoring in social work, Buchanan was interested in doing something in the sports industry. She said the experience at March Madness helped solidify some thoughts about joining sport marketing and made a lasting impression on her.
“(Especially) if I do plan to go forward with sport marketing, it’ll give me an idea of what area I want to work in because sport marketing is very broad,” Buchanan said. “… So I think being able to work the March Madness tournament, I can just think of, like, what different things I saw people doing and which one I want to go into.”
Colin Crowell, a senior majoring in sport management with a minor in marketing, said his main responsibility was making sure everything was set up: from the practice courts to the locker rooms to hanging all the banners around the arena. Much like Buchanan, he said there was a heightened sense of responsibility that went with the tournament.
“It’s a billion-dollar project,” he said. “… So, a large corporation like that, you definitely feel more responsibility and more initiative needs to be taken just to put things into place.”
Mahtee O’Shea, a senior majoring in sport management with a minor in exercise science, was the lead for the player and coach check-in. She made sure everyone from the players to the staff had proper credentials. She also talked with the team’s director of operations and made sure everything was correctly organized.
She said the biggest takeaway from working at an event of this size was the networking aspect.
“You never know who you’re going to meet. And once you meet someone, you never know who they could connect you with,” O’Shea said. “… I was able to meet so many other people, especially people that were from, like, other areas in Kansas.”
Lasting memories
Buchanan said that seeing the behind-the-scenes work of what goes into running an event this large was one of her favorite parts of volunteering.
On the first day of the games, she remembered seeing announcers and reporters conducting interviews.
“I was just thinking about how people are seeing that from home on TV,” Buchanan said. “And I’m just standing here, like, watching it right next to me as it happens. So, that was really cool.”
Crowell said he will remember seeing every fan who showed up for an open practice before the start of the event.
“I didn’t even know there was going to be fans there, even though it was an open practice,” Crowell said. “But it was cool to see how many people showed up.”
O’Shea said she won’t forget helping set up the locker rooms. She has assisted with event operations for the past three years at WSU and worked with the people she normally does for events on campus during the tournament.
“Just having fun down in the locker rooms and in the tunnel and everything with the group of guys that I was with,” O’Shea said. “I work with them every day. So, it was fun to work with them in a different environment in a different stadium.”
Ford got the opportunity to walk along the skywalk at the top of INTRUST Bank Arena. He said that was one of his favorite memories, but he couldn’t pick just one single moment.
“Just everything we were doing that whole entire four days was just a blast. I’ll never forget (them),” Ford said.
This year will likely be Ross’ last as host media coordinator. By the time Wichita can host games again, he’ll be nearly 55, and it’ll be a good opportunity for someone new to fill that spot. Still, he wants to help run the show — just not in the same capacity.
He said the relationships he’s made along the way are the best part of the job. He compared seeing everyone he’s known and met to a family reunion.
“I don’t know another event or anything like that where you get students, faculty and alumni all together at the same time, working together all while working an event that injects millions of dollars into the local economy,” Ross said. “It’s different. And they (the students) will be better off for having worked it, but the city is better off for them having been there to help put this thing on because it puts Wichita on the map.”
