Iowa guard Caitlin Clark celebrates in the course of the second half of an Elite Eight faculty basketball recreation towards Louisville within the NCAA Match towards Louisville, Sunday, March 26, 2023, in Seattle. Stephen Brashear, Related Press
Tickets for the NCAA girls’s basketball Last 4 video games on Friday have surged for the reason that matchups had been finalized, changing into dearer than tickets for the lads’s Last 4.
As of Thursday, the most affordable resale tickets for Friday’s video games on Ticketmaster are $218, which covers admission to each video games. Tickets to sit down within the first row behind the courtside seats value $2,200, and one reseller is asking $3,999 for tickets to sit down 12 rows again.
Tickets to the ladies’s championship are going for as little as $150 but in addition as excessive as $3,999, regardless of the 2 groups enjoying within the recreation not being decided but.
Attending the lads’s Last 4 on Saturday is rather more inexpensive. Resale tickets can be found for as little as $40 within the nosebleed sections, in line with Ticketmaster. Getting nearer to the motion on the court docket may value followers as much as $5,000.
A seat on the championship is even cheaper, solely costing followers $39. A lot of the tickets within the decrease degree for what Ticketmaster considers the “finest seats” value between $1,034 to $2,500.
Who's enjoying within the NCAA girls’s Last 4?
Friday’s video games begin with a matchup between LSU and Virginia Tech, two packages experiencing a historic season.
LSU is making its first journey to the Last 4 since 2008, which can be the final time the workforce had a 31-win season, in line with CBS Sports activities.
For Virginia Tech, this 12 months marks the Hokies’ first Last 4 look, and this season was solely the second time this system superior to the Candy 16, ESPN reported.
Defending champions South Carolina will face off towards the Iowa Hawkeyes, together with star Caitlin Clark, in what The Athletic referred to as the matchup “the game deserves.”
South Carolina’s Daybreak Staley, this 12 months’s Naismith Girls’s Coach of the 12 months, will look to proceed her workforce’s 42-game successful streak that dates again to final season. To take action, she’ll should develop a recreation plan to cease Clark, the 2023 Naismith Girls’s Faculty Participant of the 12 months.
The South Carolina-Iowa recreation will function the NCAA’s high offensive and defensive groups. The Hawkeyes are averaging 87.6 factors per recreation, and the Gamecocks are solely permitting their opponents to attain 50.4 factors per recreation.
In Iowa’s Elite Eight win over Louisville, Clark recorded the primary 40-point triple-double in NCAA males’s or girls’s match historical past and was accountable for 72% of her workforce’s offense, in line with CBS Sports activities.
Why are tickets for the ladies’s Last 4 dearer than the lads’s?
In contrast to the lads’s Last 4, the ladies’s consists of top-seeded groups and big-name gamers and packages. For the primary time since seeding was utilized in 1979, no top-three seeded groups can be enjoying within the males’s Last 4, in line with Yahoo! Sports activities.
A ticket to the ladies’s championship weekend offers basketball followers with the prospect to see the most important names in girls’s faculty basketball, like Clark, South Carolina’s Aliyah Boston and LSU’s Angel Reese.
The demand for tickets ought to come as no shock primarily based on TV viewership numbers for the ladies’s match. Virtually 2.5 million followers tuned into ESPN on Sunday to look at Clark and Iowa beat Louisville. That’s greater than the viewership for any NBA recreation on ESPN this season, Yahoo! Sports activities reported.
One more reason for the ticket value disparity is the distinction in venues.
The ladies’s championship weekend is being performed within the smaller 20,000-seat American Airways Heart, the place the Dallas Mavericks play, in comparison with the bigger NRG Stadium, which can host the lads’s championship weekend.
NRG Stadium final hosted the Last 4 in 2016 and had an introduced attendance of 75,505, in line with Entrance Workplace Sports activities.