Wichita March Madness 2025: A slow start but a strong finish | Opinion
March Madness Wichita 2025 edition was kind of the same as 2018, but also kind of different.
We’ve just spent the last four days in the national spotlight, so as our piece of the NCAA basketball tournament wound down to its final game on Saturday night, I caught up with Brad Pittman, senior associate athletic director at Wichita State University, who organized both this year’s and the 2018 Wichita tournament stops.
“I think for the most part, it’s been a very successful tournament,” he said. “You know, the end result is exactly what we hoped for and wanted and worked so hard for. But everything’s always different year to year. It’s always different. But that’s not a bad thing.”
Probably the biggest difference was this tournament weekend didn’t have the Kansas Jayhawks, with their enormous fan base around here.
“You have different different teams, different just set up, but I think overall the result is the same,” Pittman said. “I think you have a city that’s excited to have this kind of basketball here — has supported it really well. It’s gone well, you know, I think for the most part, it’s been a very successful tournament.”
The final chapter won’t be written until Visit Wichita comes out with the report on the economic impact of the event, but I officed out of Intrust Bank Arena three days this past week to evaluate the scene.
For the most part, I’d agree with Pittman.
We had good crowds inside and outside of Intrust Bank Arena on game days.
And the bars, restaurants and pop-up beer gardens seemed to be doing a brisk business — if not quite the “No, you can’t come in here because of the fire code” crowds we had seven years ago.
Unrelated to basketball, Wichita Mayor Lily Wu had a rough week since Tuesday, when she came under withering criticism from LBGTQ+ advocates for declining to sign a proclamation declaring March 31 as Transgender Day of Visibility.
“It’s been a very busy week,” she said Saturday.
But she was smiling as she wandered through the outside-the-arena attractions.
“You don’t have to go to a game,” she said. “I actually don’t have tickets to the game myself. I’m just walking around from Naftzger Park to Union Station to Commerce Street, to here at Brick and Mortar. I’m just really enjoying that people are walking around and enjoying themselves and gathering as a community.”
Our March Madness ended a lot better than it began.
Thursday through Saturday was long-sleeve-shirt to light-jacket weather, a sharp contrast to Wednesday, when a freak one-day winter storm blew through with sleet, snow and temperatures and winds in the 30s.
They don’t play games on Wednesday — our game days were Thursday and Saturday — but the Wednesday event, open practices, is the only part of the tournament that’s free to the public.
Last time around, we had the Kansas Jayhawks in town for the tournament and practice day set the stage for a weekend of basketball excitement both inside and outside the arena. This year, not so much.
“I think last time we caught lightning in a bottle,” said Pittman. “So, you know, we bused in 6,000 kids (from local schools). And I think Kansas had seven or eight thousand fans here. So you were close to 14,000 at one point . . . But I think overall, we were 3,500 total for open practice this time. So just different, you know, and I still think that was a really good turnout for us.”
Frankly, most of the games weren’t all that great.
The first two were blowouts that left everybody feeling pretty bored. I heard one fan say as he exited the arena, “I paid $200 for that?
And he was a Houston fan. His team won.
It got a little better later in the day Thursday. We even had an upset special, when 11th-seed Drake knocked off sixth-seeded Missouri to advance to Saturday. But their budding Cinderella story ended Saturday when they ran up against No. 3 seed Texas Tech and lost 77-64.
The only nail-biter was the final game on Saturday night, a Houston-Gonzaga matchup that wasn’t decided until a pair of free throws with 2.1 seconds on the clock iced it for Houston 81-76.
But in the end the real measure of success is the experience we created for fans from around the country.
I talked to dozens of them and they all gave us rave reviews.
“The nicest people in the country are right here,” said Gary Leonard, who lives in and roots for Houston. Between games, “We went to the cowboy Museum (Old Cowtown) and that was really great.”
“The Wichita experience has been really nice,” said Derek Martin of Lubbock, a Texas Tech student who has only been to Wichita once before. “The weather cooperated when we were here, so that was really nice. But as far as the people, the ease of getting around the city, the infrastructure is really good. So nice, clean. People were nice. Really enjoyed it.”
So though we may not have matched our March Madness magic of 2018, we showed we still got game.
