The Sunday before the Division I Men’s Basketball Championship game, the NCAA’s  Greg Shaheen glanced outside as he walked through a covered link between his hotel and the Indianapolis Convention Center.

What he saw stopped him in his tracks.

“It was a sea of young people dribbling basketballs with their families,” said Shaheen, vice president for Division I men’s basketball and championships strategies. “I knew it was going on, but it was a great vantage point. Everywhere I looked there were kids dribbling basketballs and their families were with them. That’s what we always wanted.”

Dozens of moments like that one, officially dubbed “the Circle City Dribble,” made this year’s Men’s Final Four special.

Shaheen predicted as much — 12 months ago, right after the 2005 version of the Men’s Final Four was completed. Just days after the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, wrapped up its fourth title in St. Louis, Shaheen said the 2006 edition in Indianapolis would be the gold standard for judging future Final Fours.

Such is life for Shaheen and the army of other administrators who annually deliver the NCAA’s marquee event. Aside from ensuring that the championship is well administered, the staff also is charged each year with elevating the entire Final Four experience.

This year’s major takeaway: For the first time, thousands of people were a part of the Final Four experience even though they never set foot in the arena where the games were played. Indianapolis’ historic Monument Circle was transformed to include a stage, an elaborate sound system and enormous video screens to show the games to masses of people who didn’t have tickets to the RCA Dome down the street. Organizers involved the entire community with a string of events like the Sunday concerts at “My Coke Fest,” a Saturday pep rally, the “Big Dance” viewing party for the semifinal and final games, an improved Hoop City production, and expanded educational offerings.

Video boards at all the venues displayed NCAA messaging throughout the weekend. Daktronics, a visual communications company, inaugurated an LED video board system that spanned the length of the scorer’s table at the RCA Dome, providing not only more space for Association messaging, but also game statistics.

Initial feedback indicated that fans enjoyed the bonus activities spread throughout the weekend. The varied events provided fans with tickets and those just enjoying the atmosphere a good time that began well before opening tip-off Saturday and continued through the presentation of the championship trophy Monday night.

Jon LeCrone, commissioner of the Horizon League and leader of the Final Four’s local organizing committee, said all facets of the Indianapolis community responded to issues or needs that arose throughout the weekend. He credited Shaheen and the NCAA basketball staff with putting together a “fabulous” set of events that set Indianapolis apart from other cities. Each host city, he said, can now put its own stamp on the Final Four.

“Every single Final Four is no longer cookie cutter. They’re giving communities the ability to do something special,” LeCrone said, specifying a food festival at the 2005 Final Four in St. Louis and the John Mellencamp concert in Indianapolis this year as events that would happen nowhere else.

“But at the same time, the event is still similar in a lot of ways. We’re really pleased to be able to do something for people who, number one, don’t have a ticket and, number two, do have a ticket but recognize it’s a long wait all day Saturday and all day Monday,” he said. “It’s a significant event. The ancillary activities just make it a complete package.”

That’s entertainment

Critics might point to the non-stop stream of events as becoming too commercial, too corporate and too much like the crowning affair of professional sports, the Super Bowl. Shaheen said comparisons with the Super Bowl are “interesting” and noted that they reflect the popularity of the Final Four. But he said the Super Bowl effect is not the goal. Instead, the primary mission is to ensure that the student-athletes’ needs are met in every way.

“This year’s format didn’t change their schedule; it didn’t impede their desire to go to dinner here or there. It didn’t affect their team sessions or their sleep or anything like that,” he said. “In our case, we will always start with the venue and make sure that the venue and the competition itself and those who compete in the Final Four are taken care of. That’s first. Then we build out from there.

“That’s why there are no concerts during games and so forth. There are some distinct differences between what other sporting events have done and what we have done up to this point.”

LeCrone noted that the Final Four is a major event with a high level of competition. That means it garners more fan and media attention — and subsequently corporate partnerships — than any other NCAA event.

“Those things need to be accommodated, and we do that in a tasteful way, which does separate this event from the Super Bowl,” he said. “It’s not the Super Bowl. It’s a wonderful celebration of a basketball season and a basketball championship. I’ve been to two or three Super Bowls, and (the Final Four) doesn’t have the glitz that surrounds the Super Bowl. You don’t have stretch limos lined up at every hotel dropping off a lot of Hollywood celebrities and high-profile stars to the game.”

Though the Association has no desire to turn the Final Four into a professional event, Shaheen believes lessons can be learned from the way the National Football League has built the Super Bowl.

“The Super Bowl is the gold standard of all the major events,” he said. “We’re striving for something different because they’re clearly the masters at that. We’re just trying to provide something good for the people who live in the city, the region where we go and those who are in town for the event itself.”

In doing that, the NCAA has the opportunity to teach ticket holders and the general public about the Association’s mission, its members and the student-athletes it exists to serve. The Monument Circle video screens and similar technology at the RCA Dome gave the Association the chance to educate thousands of people who might not otherwise learn about the NCAA.

“We’re trying to use every available tool we can to get the word out about who we are and what we do,” Shaheen said. Besides messaging and NCAA trivia, the video boards played the NCAA public service announcements hundreds of times throughout the weekend. Those pieces, he said, “explain who we are, what we do and give a presence and peace of mind that participating in or being a part of the NCAA championship is something of which to be very proud.”

Expanding the event to include thousands of people who do not have game tickets is a move designed to advance the Association’s message to as many fans as possible.

“It allows us to position the Association in a positive light, place what we do in context, demonstrate that we’re solid in what we do, but that we’re also interested in having fun,” Shaheen said.

Division I Men’s Basketball Committee Chair Craig Littlepage, athletics director at the University of Virginia, saw the surrounding events as a way to bring people together — fans who were passionately pulling for different teams in the semifinal games.

“One of the things we do so well in intercollegiate athletics is bring people together and develop relationships,” he said. “I think the opportunity to have tens of thousands of people gathered in the circle for the pep rally on Saturday afternoon, then to have the concert that took place all Sunday afternoon and into the evening was a phenomenal opportunity to bring the fans of the different schools together in such a way that contrasts the actual basketball games themselves.”

Organizers kept the entertainment “wholesome and family-oriented,” LeCrone said, citing Hoop City, the youth dribble and the Mellencamp concert as events people of any age could attend.

“It’s G-rated stuff, and that’s what makes this great,” he said.

Focusing on Atlanta

Gary Walters, a basketball committee member and athletics director at Princeton University, said the events surrounding the basketball games provided a chance to enhance school spirit, an objective that is consistent with the values of the NCAA.

The only noticeable hiccups — severe weather that threatened Sunday’s activities and three games that were decided by large margins — were outside of the control of organizers or staff. Still, organizers will look to improve future events.

With that in mind, both NCAA staff and the committee are beginning to sharpen their focus on Atlanta. The NCAA basketball staff is excited about the leadership on the organizing committee in Atlanta. Coke and Cingular, major NCAA corporate partners, are headquartered there and will have a vested interest in ensuring an especially successful Final Four.

Organizers see Friday night as an opportunity for continued growth that would include even more of the local community. Eventually, they want an entire weekend packed with activities and entertainment options that are tied to the basketball championship.

“These are good steps, but we want everybody to be involved. We’d like the start of open practice on Friday to be the beginning of the official clock of activities that are officially sanctioned and tied to the event,” Shaheen said. “Friday night is something we’ll work to build out by next year. We’re our own toughest critics, and we look at everything and figure out how to make it better.”

Littlepage said he hopes the anticipation for Atlanta is as palpable as what it was for Indianapolis, where four schools took four unique paths to reach the pinnacle of men’s collegiate basketball competition.

“If we can have the same sort of drama and great story lines coming into the Final Four, we will have duplicated the special nature and atmosphere that surrounded this year’s event,” Littlepage said. “We have an opportunity to expand on the great success we had this year in bringing the large numbers of people together in non-basketball activities.”

LeCrone already is thinking about when the Men’s Final Four returns to Indianapolis in 2010, followed immediately by the Women’s Final Four in 2011. While he will have left the basketball committee by then, he hopes to be involved in the local organizing committees for those events.

“We’re going to have a brand new building (a domed stadium scheduled to open in 2008), and ... one of the challenges I think we’ll face is we’re going to have significantly more fans in the building to watch the game, and I think significantly more people downtown,” he said.

“We’re going to need to be prepared in 2010 to run a significantly different event. It’s not exactly starting over, but almost.”