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Gift suite adds to Men’s Final Four

Perk is a first for an NCAA championship

A gift suite is coming to the Men’s Final Four.

The suite, a shopping-spree-like experience, is a way for players on the Final Four teams to receive NCAA-authorized gifts for reaching college basketball’s national semifinals. It’s a gift-getting opportunity that’s become increasingly associated with college football bowl games over the past decade.

Final Four gift packages

Participants in this year’s national semifinals in Houston and Indianapolis are scheduled to receive the following gift packages.

Men’s Final Four (Houston): Gift suite at NRG Stadium, site of the Final Four; also: Fossil watch, Wilson bag and mini basketball, tumbler, cap, a lucite Final Four ticket and a Final Four bench chair, and a Jostens ring in a commemorative wooden display box.

Women’s Final Four (Indianapolis): Fossil watch, Wilson bag and mini basketball, bench towel, Final Four game ball inside a display cube, Jostens ring in a commemorative wooden display box, a piece of the Final Four court and a lucite Final Four ticket.

Source: NCAA

The NCAA last week said the offering will now be available at college basketball’s season-ending event in Houston this year, April 2-4. There were not plans as of last week to have a suite available for the Women’s Final Four in Indianapolis.

When asked about the addition, Chris Radford, the association’s associate director of external affairs, said via email: “The Men’s Final Four will be the first NCAA championship to have a gift suite, but moving forward we will evaluate the possibility of including similar options at [the] Women’s Final Four.”

Performance Award Center has been hired by the NCAA to make the Men’s Final Four gift suite happen. PAC is a Carrollton, Texas-based company that serves as a broker between high-end brands and companies that provide gifts and incentives to their employees and partners. In this case, they’ll be putting together the selection of gifts from which players from the four men’s semifinal teams will be able to select up to seven items.

According to NCAA rules, players can receive both participation and championship gifts as student athletes — for basketball, football and other sports. The value of the gifts that the players receive can vary between seniors and underclassmen, and gifts can be provided by both a player’s school and the school’s conference, in addition to the NCAA’s providing of gifts to athletes who compete in season-ending national tournaments.

Counting all three sources — school, conference and NCAA — players on a team that wins basketball championships for the regular season, the school’s postseason conference tournament and the NCAA tournament could take home total gifts valued at close to $4,000, which doesn’t include the gift suite for the men.

The NCAA sets caps on the value of the gifts schools and conferences can provide. The association, however, according to its own rules, has no limit on the value of the gifts it can provide in an NCAA-run tournament.

The NCAA does not operate bowl games but sets a cap of $550 per person on the value of the gifts the bowls can provide to participants. Last season, 25 bowl committees set up gift suites for participating teams. Among the gifts featured in these suites are recliners, jewelry, TVs, headphones and speakers.

As of last week, the NCAA had not determined what gifts would be made available in the Men’s Final Four gift suite. Jon Cooperstein, who leads PAC’s sports marketing division, said his crew will set up the interactive shopping experience inside Houston’s NRG Stadium, host of the Final Four, on Wednesday, March 30. The players will do their shopping on Thursday and Friday, before the games on Saturday.

The Final Four gift packages will add to gifts that the players will receive for their teams being part of the national tournament this year, along with gifts for taking part in their schools’ conference tournaments.

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