What Happens To Final Four Courts After The Championship?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- The squeak of the shoe, the pound of the dribble. It's the gleaming hard maple floor that absorbs the entire show.
Every Final Four, the court takes center stage. It's a surface built new every year just for the three games in the tournament.
That had Sarah From Brooten and Jayne From Savage asking: What happens to the court when the games are over?
Every year, the winning team gets the first crack at buying an everlasting reminder of a game well-played. In recent history, most schools have taken up the floor's manufacturer on that offer.
Villanova has two floors from 2016 and 2018. An anonymous donor bought them both and one now makes up the floor of a club in their arena.
Kansas put Center Court in their practice gym.
Kentucky's court is now the floor of their locker room.
And as for Duke, they have three courts, and have pieces on display at the school, and have made watches out of it. They also put much of 2001's winning court at the Emily Krzyzewski Family Life Center in Durham.
Most of these schools also cut up the floor into small pieces and sell them. You can get one of Villanova's for between $75 and $250.
One of the schools that said "thanks but no thanks" to purchasing their winning court was UConn in 2011. (They just stuck with the one they had in 1999.)
The court floors cost between $80,000 and $100,000 to make.
Since Michigan State is not in the finals, one of the winners will be first-timers, which means there's a pretty good chance Texas Tech or Virginia will buy the floor when it's all said and done.