The Final 8 is coming back to Halifax, but how long it stays here is unknown.
Atlantic University Sport, which will host the Canadian Interuniversity Sport men’s basketball championship at the Metro Centre in 2011 and 2012, does not plan to submit a bid to host the 2013 and 2014 events by the May 14 deadline.
The event was held in Halifax for 24 straight years before it moved to Scotiabank Place in Ottawa after Carleton University won the right to host it from 2008 to 2010.
AUS executive director Phil Currie said a new hosting model — which sees the CIS take 75 per cent of sponsorship inventory instead of handing it all over to the host — muddies the waters for bids beyond 2012. He said the AUS needs to take the new model for a test run in 2011 first.
“We haven’t operated under that model,” Currie said.
“We don’t know what the outcomes will be based on the new model … Why would we go forward and bid on something when we don’t know what it will look like at the end?”
Currie called the May 14 deadline “an unrealistic time frame” given the uncertainty.
The event had mixed reviews in Ottawa. Attendance dropped by 29,000 from 2008 to 2010 in Ottawa, a decrease of almost 36 per cent, according to numbers published in the Ottawa Citizen.
