MAAC Women's Basketball Championship Game Goes National
MAAC Sports
Edison, N.J. - The 2011 MAAC Women's Basketball Championship Game, scheduled for Monday, March 7 at 1:00 p.m., will be broadcast nationally for the first time on ESPNU, the 24-hour college sports network. The Arena at Harbor Yard in Bridgeport, Conn. will host the 2011 MAAC Basketball Championships from March 3-7.
Since 1991, when the men's and women's championships were moved to the same site, the women's championship game has been played on Sunday during the MAAC Basketball Championships. The format change, which gives the women's championship game participants a day off following the semifinals, was approved by the MAAC Council of Presidents in June.
"It's a great opportunity for the MAAC to move its premier championship game from a regional network to a national platform like ESPNU," said MAAC Commissioner Richard J. Ensor. "We look forward to the network's 72.5 million viewers tuning in for MAAC Women's Basketball."
This will be just the second MAAC Women's Basketball Championship Game shown nationally and the first since March 3, 1996, when the game appeared on ESPN2. Manhattan defeated Fairfield, 92-66, at Knickerbocker Arena (now Times Union Center) in Albany, N.Y. to claim its third of four titles.
About ESPNU
ESPNU launched March 4, 2005. The 24-hour college sports television network televises more than 650 live events annually. Action includes a variety of top football and men's and women's basketball games, as well as Olympic sports from 26 Division I conferences. ESPNU is the destination for premier high school programming, including elite football and basketball events. The network also has a wide-ranging agreement with the NCAA for extensive coverage of 22 NCAA Championships.
ESPNU offers over 400 original studio shows, including SportsCenterU, ESPNU Recruiting Insider, The Experts, The Bracket, BCS Countdown and is the television home of ESPN Radio's The Herd with Colin Cowherd. The brand is also available in high definition on ESPNUHD, now in over 20 million homes. In addition, ESPNU Campus Connection is a multiplatform, student-generated content initiative to enhance the network's link to college campuses nationwide.
ESPNU has seen a dramatic increase since its inception and is now in more than 72.5 million households. The network and has long-term carriage agreements with all 10 of the top multichannel TV providers - Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, Cox, DirecTV (Channel 208), DISH Network (Channel 141), Mediacom, Time Warner Cable, Verizon FiOS TV and AT&T U-verse.