Basketball
In sports, Spokane is arguably most notable for being the home of the Gonzaga Bulldogs and their NCAA Division I college basketball program that competes in the West Coast Conference (WCC). Although the WCC is often considered a “mid-major” conference, the Gonzaga basketball program is often considered a major program. Gonzaga is one of only nine schools to have reached each of the past ten NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournaments, and is the only school not from a major conference to do so. They have made it to the tournament every time since Gonzaga's rise to national prominence in their Cinderella run to the Elite 8 in the 1999 tournament. Gonzaga has produced many NBA players, including John Stockton, Frank Burgess Dan Dickau, Richie Frahm, Ronny Turiaf, Austin Daye, Jeremy Pargo and Adam Morrison. When the college basketball season begins, the Bulldogs regularly sell out their home games in the recently built McCarthey Athletic Center on the Gonzaga University campus, just north of downtown. The Bulldogs are the current WCC regular-season champions, a title which they have held for the last eight years.
Hoopfest is a large, annual 3-on-3 basketball tournament.
The Spokane Arena is the perennial host to the State 'B' Basketball Tournament, which brings athletes and fans from across Washington to Spokane. With the split of the 'B' classification in 2006, beginning in 2007 the city will be host to the State 2B (the state's second smallest class) Basketball Championships.
Read more about this topic: Sports In Spokane, Washington
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)