The UAA athletic department will pay a Seattle-area firm as much as $35,000 to find two men's basketball teams to play in the 2016 GCI Great Alaska Shootout.
The university on Wednesday announced a multi-year agreement with Basketball Travelers, Inc., a group from Edmonds, Washington, that arranges domestic and international basketball games and tournaments.
BTI will essentially serve as a head-hunter. It will take over the scheduling of teams for the 2016 and 2017 Shootouts, a task previously handled by athletic department administrators and coaches.
It will also, according to a press release from UAA, assume responsibility for "developing national television partnerships, elevating the profile of the event, and assisting in the development of a business plan to ensure long-term success for the Shootout."
Nate Sagan, UAA's assistant athletic director for media relations, said there's a memorandum of understanding between UAA and BTI that covers the rest of the calendar year.
Under the terms of that agreement, UAA will pay BTI a flat fee for finding the two teams needed to fill the 2016 field.
The fee is $7,500 per team, provided the team ranks in the top 175 of the 351 Division I teams that make up the NCAA's RPI ratings, Sagan said.
If BTI lands a team from one of the NCAA's top six conferences, it will get a $10,000 bonus, Sagan said.
That means if BTI finds two teams from the Big 10, Big 12, Pac 12, ACC, SEC, Big East or American Athletic Conference, UAA will pay the firm $35,000.
Six of the eight tournament spots are filled for 2016, although UAA will not identify those teams. BTI will look for the remaining two teams during the period of the partnership between now and the end of the year.
How much the university will pay BTI in the future "is still under negotiation," Sagan said.
BTI is the same group hired by UAF in 2005 to find teams for the now-defunct Top of the World Classic in Fairbanks. Three years later, BTI told the university it couldn't find teams and the tournament was cancelled, according to a Fairbanks Daily News-Miner report.
In the past, UAA administrators and coaches found teams for the Shootout, which has been played every year since 1978 during the week of Thanksgiving.
For the first decade or two, luring marquee teams to Anchorage was a fairly easy job. Teams like North Carolina, Kentucky and Indiana were eager to come here and take advantage of NCAA rules aimed at helping colleges in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico establish NCAA programs despite their distance from the Lower 48.
Those rules granted exemptions allowing schools in those places to host games in advance of the official opening day of the basketball season and allowing visiting teams to not count all of those games against their season limit.
Over the years, the NCAA relaxed its rules limiting preseason tournaments, leading to the proliferation of similar tournaments and diminishing the Shootout's appeal. These days the Shootout rarely attracts big-name teams, something reflected in both attendance and national TV coverage. In 2009, UAA had so much trouble finding men's teams that the tournament field shrank from eight teams to six.
BTI hosts a couple of tournaments and helps organize several others, including the Paradise Jam in the Virgin Islands, whose eight-team field this year includes Tulsa, Florida State and DePaul.
It also helps organize international trips for individual college teams and is involved in international events like the World University Games.
"Someone like this has so many connections down in the Lower 48, because they're traveling around a lot, shaking people's hands," Sagan said. "They have good connections with everybody in television, including CBS."
UAA is in the final year of a television deal with CBS Sports. UAA's partnership with BTI may ensure the tournament continues to get national television coverage, Sagan said.
"BTI and CBS are partners in the Paradise Jam, so they already work together," he said. "The first plan of action will be to have BTI talk to CBS about an extension. If for some reason that didn't work out, they would help us pursue other TV options."