The worth of a seat to observe the Final Four of the ladies’s NCAA Tournament has rivaled the price of attending the boys’s occasion.

Steph Chambers/Getty Images

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Steph Chambers/Getty Images

The worth of a seat to observe the Final Four of the ladies’s NCAA Tournament has rivaled the price of attending the boys’s occasion.

Steph Chambers/Getty Images

Those hoping to see Caitlin Clark win a nationwide championship in her remaining weekend as the very best participant in faculty basketball must pay up.

Tickets to see Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes meet the Connecticut Huskies within the Final Four of this 12 months’s girls’s NCAA Tournament — together with the opposite semifinal matchup between undefeated South Carolina and North Carolina State — have been extra in style than ever, ticketing platforms say, with costs rivaling and even surpassing tickets to the boys’s occasion.

Logitix, a ticketing companies firm, reported Wednesday that the common sale worth for a resale ticket to the ladies’s semifinal had reached $2,323. By comparability, the common sale worth for the boys’s occasion was simply over $1,000, it mentioned.

As of Friday noon, the most affordable resale seats out there for every occasion was roughly the identical worth — round $300 to $350 every when bought as a pair (not counting charges charged by on-line ticketing platforms). The males’s occasion had increased costs for the costliest tickets, by about $1,900 to to $1,000.

The excessive costs for the ladies’s Final Four are a continuation of a pattern that started final 12 months, according to the ticket resale platform StubHub. In 2023, the common ticket worth for the ladies’s Final Four was 15 % increased than the boys’s occasion, the corporate reported. It added that whole gross sales for 2023’s girls’s Final Four had been six occasions increased than in 2022.

Those 2023 totals have now been bested, StubHub mentioned. “This year is the best-selling women’s Final Four ever,” it said Thursday on the social media site X.

One issue to notice is the distinction in venue dimension for the 2 occasions. Women’s Final Fours are usually held at an NBA area, whereas since 2009 the boys’s groups have performed in NFL stadiums quickly reconfigured to host a basketball recreation.

This 12 months, the 2 girls’s semifinal video games will happen Friday night at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in downtown Cleveland, residence to the NBA’s Cavaliers. That area seats about 19,400 attendees.

By distinction, the boys’s Final Four will happen at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., an NFL stadium that often hosts the Arizona Cardinals. That venue is way bigger; when configured for basketball, it is able to seating as many as 73,000 people.

Interest in girls’s faculty basketball has soared this 12 months due to Clark’s record-breaking season and a cast of other compelling stars like Angel Reese and Flau’jae Johnson of Louisiana State, JuJu Watkins of USC and Paige Bueckers of UConn.

That increase in consideration culminated final Monday within the record-breaking TV viewers for the Elite Eight matchup between Iowa and LSU, a rematch of final 12 months’s nationwide championship recreation that ended with a 94-87 Hawkeyes victory.

More than 12 million viewers watched the Iowa-LSU recreation, ESPN reported, making it the most-watched faculty basketball recreation ever on ESPN platforms and one of many most-viewed video games of any sport in addition to the NFL over the previous 12 months. (The solely recreation of the boys’s event to this point to high that viewers was the Elite Eight matchup between the popular Cinderella team North Carolina State and Duke, which was broadcast over community tv on CBS.)

“It’s hard for you to wrap your head around. When you step on the court and you’re playing for 40 minutes, you’re not thinking, like, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s 10 million-plus people watching this game at home,'” Clark mentioned in a press convention Thursday.

But, she added, then she noticed how the Iowa-LSU viewers had stacked up towards different sports activities broadcasts this season — higher than all however one common season faculty soccer recreation, higher than all however one recreation of final 12 months’s NBA Finals, higher than the deciding recreation of final 12 months’s World Series.

“I think that really puts into perspective where women’s basketball is going and the type of excitement around our game,” Clark mentioned.