The All India Inter-Zonal Basketball Tournament championship torphy.
The game was played in a barn, on a concrete floor, with holes in the ceiling and only a few people in the stands. This is how Universal Basketball Alliance Founder Richard Whelan described last year’s edition of India’s annual university men’s basketball tournament. However, a lot can change in a year. The All India Inter-Zonal Basketball Tournament, which is the largest of its kind in the world, is being nationally televised for the first time this year. UBA has signed a 10-year agreement with All India University, India’s equivalent to the NCAA, to telecast the men’s competition. The tournament, which included a total of 214 university teams from all across the country at the start, is down to its final 16 teams. The top four teams from each of the four zones (West, North, East and South) have come together in Chennai to crown a champion on Monday. UBA hopes that it can replicate the success ESPN had with the NCAA tournament back in the early ‘80s. “The NCAA basketball tournament in America started at nothing and then was put on TV and really helped explode ESPN. Now the tournament is worth $750 million a year and profitable to the tune of about $500 million a year,” Whelan said. He believes that the Inter-Zonal Tournament could have a similar effect as basketball is growing in India and the costs of producing game broadcasts are fairly small. UBA was able to lock up deals with a number of Indian TV networks and cable providers. It also signed sponsorship deals with companies such as Wrangler, Oakley, Dingaling and Li-Ning, among others. The sponsorship interest along with the national TV exposure seems to support Whelan’s theory. “Indian networks are looking for content. We won’t give anyone exclusivity. We are strong enough this year to stay independent,” he said. Whelan added that the tournament will be broadcast on a local, regional and national level. In addition to game broadcasts, UBA is putting an emphasis on shoulder programming. “Not many people, not even players, know about the tournament,” Whelan said. UBA plans to change this by producing profiles on teams, coaches and players.
AS MANY EYES AS POSSIBLE: Over the next 36 months, Whelan said, the goal is to reach the widest audience possible. This includes TV as well as online and mobile. “That would really be our measuring stick, more so than ratings,” he said. According to Whelan, TV ratings are hard to quantify in India as the ratings system is under scrutiny. He said that official ratings company TAM has 5,000 set-top boxes in a country of 1.2 billion. In addition to UBA’s ambitious plans, basketball is being fueled by two other entities in India. The NBA and Reliance have set their sights on developing the sport on the sub-continent and while Whelan believes cooperation between the different entities could be fruitful, he said that it would be premature for UBA to engage in talks. “We are just kind of focused on what we do. We are open to anybody who wants to talk to us,” Whelan said. “We are who we are, the biggest university basketball tournament in the world.”
