The NCAA says it has not ruled out venues in North Carolina as possible sites for championship events between 2018 and 2022, after a letter from a local marketing agency addressed to lawmakers said all the Tar Heel state’s bids to host post-season competitions in that time frame would be rejected due to HB2, or the “bathroom bill.”
The News & Observer (Raleigh) printed a document from the North Carolina Sports Association on Monday that quoted sources from the NCAA who said all 133 requests made by the state’s cities and colleges to host title-related competitions in the next half-decade were set to be “pulled from the review process and removed from consideration.” The NCAA announced last September it would relocate seven such occasions for the current school year in response to the statute, as it pressured North Carolina to overturn the law. The state suffered a similar ramification via the NBA, which removed its 2017 all-star game from Charlotte, and multiple entertainers have cancelled performances there.
The NCAA, though, remained mum in a statement provided to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
“The NCAA decided in September to remove championships from North Carolina for the 2016-17 season, and it has not yet determined future championship sites. The NCAA expects to announce site selections for the 2018-19 through 2021-22 championship seasons in April,” the statement read. A spokesperson linked to a press release about the organization’s previous decision on the ’16-’17 campaign, in which NCAA president Mark Emmert said, “Fairness is about more than the opportunity to participate in college sports, or even compete for championships.”
North Carolina’s assembly has entertained, messily, attempts to eliminate HB2 since then. The Atlantic has a roundup of the politics that derailed efforts in December, which was supposed to entail, roughly, the concurrent repeal of the law and the Charlotte LGBT ordinance that beckoned the bill in the first place. But the legislature’s Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on repeal language; Democrats proposed outright repeal, which Republicans rejected, and Republicans wanted an accompanying moratorium on ordinances similar to the Charlotte measure, which Democrats rejected.
Per the CharlotteObserver, Democratic governor Roy Cooper said Tuesday there is an “urgency” to repeal the law, and that he believes the Republican leaders in both chambers of the assembly “want to see House Bill 2 gone.” He cited their legislative work in December as evidence. “We didn’t get there. That was our best chance, but it cannot be our last chance.”
Phil Berger, the state senate’s Republican leader, criticized Cooper in a statement provided to TWS Monday evening. “HB2 would have been long gone if Gov. Cooper had not directed all Senate Democrats to block its repeal, and he is going to have to work toward a compromise that keeps women from being forced to share bathrooms and shower facilities with men to move past this distraction.”
David Allen Martin wrote for TWS about the intersection of sports and HB2 here.
