No Palace For These Cinderellas

Still, a handful of teams call the NCAA each year to request a last-minute move, tournament director Greg Shaheen said.

"If they don't like where they're staying, we don't want them to be quiet about it," Shaheen said. "Hotels are one of the most important pieces of this whole event."

Players and coaches identify an adequate hotel as the cornerstone to a successful NCAA tournament experience. Teams that reach the Final Four in Atlanta will spend as many as 15 nights on the road, relying on their hotels to provide all of college life's necessities. In preparing to host teams during the tournament, hotels set up makeshift classrooms for study halls and miniature theaters for game film sessions. Most hotels are responsible for preparing or catering pregame meals.

During Korn's 2002 stay in Syracuse, the Salukis refused to eat food prepared inside what was then called Hotel Syracuse -- a deteriorating, circular tower in the underbelly of the city. Instead, Korn and his teammates asked if they could eat a pregame meal in a Syracuse University dining hall.

Chris Lowery, Southern Illinois' current head coach who was an assistant coach in 2002, suffered an allergic reaction while at Hotel Syracuse. His face broke out in hives, and he missed a pregame practice. Doctors weren't sure what caused the reaction, but players blamed the food and cleanliness of their hotel.

"There can be a gap between hotels number one and number eight when it comes to the details, but you try to prepare the hotels for what they're getting into," said Tim Allen, an associate commissioner for the Big 12 Conference who managed an NCAA tournament first-and-second-round site during each of the last six years. "We coach the staff at every hotel to do all the right things. These teams aren't just experiencing drop-by hotel stays. A lot goes into this."

The hotel selection process for the 2007 tournament began almost four years ago, when cities bid to host the first and second rounds. Each chosen city established a host committee and designated a lodging coordinator.

Some host cities struggled to find hotels that satisfied NCAA stipulations: Properties must be located within about a 15-minute drive of the arena and offer extensive meeting space and a full service restaurant, officials said.

Until recently, the NCAA also required that each team stay in its own hotel. After complaints from coaches and players about the quality of the seventh- and eighth-best hotels in host cities, the NCAA changed its rules in the last few years, Shaheen said. Now, two teams are allowed to stay in the same hotel -- so long as they're thoroughly separated in the building and not immediately scheduled to play each other. Spokane, Wash., used five hotels this year; Winston-Salem used six.

Anne Gordon, a Wake Forest employee, served as the lodging coordinator in Winston-Salem. She initially hoped to host one team at a luxurious Wingate, but she dropped it after discovering that its ceiling heights and meeting space fell short of NCAA specifications. She visited each of her six remaining properties almost once per month during the last year, and she did preliminary rankings of them. During the winter, two NCAA representatives flew into town for a final site visit. Gordon drove them to all six hotels in one day, and they toured each property.

"They didn't change any of our rankings, so that was a success," Gordon said. "The challenge in this town was coming up with enough high-quality spaces for these teams."