NCAA basketball tournament to return to Portland in 2012

When the Oregon Sports Authority spearheaded an effort to get the state to eliminate the Sports Action lottery games in 2005, the aim was to get the NCAA Basketball Tournament to become a regular event in the state.

The plan will take another big step in 2012, when March Madness returns to Portland’s Rose Garden for a subregional. Four first-round games will be played on Thursday, March 15, and two second-round games will be held on Saturday, March 17.

This past March, the tournament was played in Oregon for the first time since 1983, and the event quickly sold out, with Pacific Northwest teams Washington and Gonzaga drawing large partisan crowds for their games.

Soon after the subregional, the Oregon Sports Authority and its partners — the University of Oregon (which served as host school), the Rose Quarter and Travel Portland — began assembling a bid for the next block of available dates. The NCAA bids out three years of the tournament at a time, and in June the Oregon group submitted bids for subregionals and regionals in the 2011-13 block.

“It was highly competitive,” said Drew Mahalic, the Oregon Sports Authority’s chief executive officer. “We heard that there were 70 bids from all over the country. To be able to be chosen among that kind of competition is something that we all need to be really proud of in Oregon.”

— Excerpt from OregonLive.com, September 21, 2009