The Ivy League basketball tournaments will return to the Palestra in 2027
After 2018, the league planned a rotation of the tournaments around its teams’ arenas. That ends one stop early, with Dartmouth giving up its turn to bring the event back to the Ivy's biggest stage.
As the Palestra’s 100th birthday comes into view, the Ivy League is giving Penn’s arena a present: The conference’s basketball tournaments will return to the gymnasium next March.
The Palestra hosted the event when it began in 2017, then again in 2018. It also hosted a neutral-site playoff between Harvard and Yale in 2015.
After 2018, the league planned a rotation of the tournaments around all eight of its teams’ arenas. That was met with some criticism over whether some venues were truly suitable, but the people who decided on the plan stuck with it.
In the end, seven venues hosted, with Cornell’s Newman Arena the last stop this year. If not for the pandemic, the rotation would have ended last year, and potentially brought the tournaments back to the Palestra this year — in line with many other big sports events this year in Philadelphia.
With the Palestra’s 100th anniversary now on the board for the 2026-27 season, Dartmouth gave up its opportunity to host, partially to defer to the celebration. The school’s 2,100-seat Leede Arena in Hanover, N.H., was always going to be one of the toughest venues for staging the event.
“We are grateful to the Ivy League and our colleagues across the other seven institutions, especially Dartmouth, for their support in helping Penn celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Palestra by hosting Ivy Madness in 2027,” Penn athletic director Alanna Wren said in a statement.
Ivy League executive director Robin Harris told The Inquirer that the league’s athletic directors “have been talking for quite some time now about ’28 and beyond,” and, at one point, Wren brought up 2027.
“Alanna mentioned it was the 100th anniversary of the Palestra next year, and that was thrown into the mix,” Harris said. “Several months ago, Mike Harrity, the AD at Dartmouth, approached me and said, ‘What do you think if we didn’t host next year, and allow the Palestra to host for the 100th anniversary?’ And so we really started talking about that.”
There will not be another full rotation, Harris told The Inquirer. She also said the league has not decided whether to go to neutral sites, the highest seeds, or just a smaller group of the Ivy’s venues.
“The rotations have been a success, but at this point, everything’s on the table for the future, except for repeating the entirety of a rotation,” Harris said.
There is a pretty wide variety in the Ivy League’s basketball arenas, from the 8,722-seat Palestra to three venues under 3,000: Dartmouth, Harvard’s Lavietes Pavilion (1,636) and Brown’s Pizzitola Sports Center (2,800). The latter two venues hosted in 2022 and 2025, respectively.
There’s also variety in the campuses’ locations, from the big cities of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia to small-town Ithaca, N.Y., and Hanover, N.H.
“Moving an event of this magnitude to different locations is almost like reinventing the tournament each time we go somewhere because the setup of venues is different, the spaces are different,” Harris said.
Fans might have made their own statement this year about where they’d rather go. The men’s semifinals drew a crowd of 2,277 at Cornell’s 4,473-seat arena, including for the host Big Red playing league champion Yale. The Penn-Yale final drew 1,466.
On the women’s side, the semifinals drew a mere 788 fans and the final 698, despite Princeton being ranked in the Top 25 and Columbia regularly selling out its home games.
Harris said ease of access for fans is “certainly part of the discussion as we look forward to the future of the tournament.”
The league has considered neutral sites previously. Harris told The Inquirer in 2019 that before deciding on the rotation, the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., was considered.
It seems that there’s now more interest in the idea than before.
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“As we look at all options, including neutral sites, we have to be fiscally responsible, and we have to look at what the cost would be to go to a neutral site,” Harris said. “But we’re looking at it in comparison to what we’re already spending by going to our own venues.”
If the math works, she said, a neutral site “certainly would be a valuable option,” and the league is open to corporate sponsorship to help.
“Certain venues are going to just be more expensive to open the doors and allow us to use the venue than others,” Harris said, “and we have to evaluate that in terms of what we’re able to bring in from ticket sales and potentially sponsorship sales.”
She does wonder sometimes what the event would look like in a big arena like Newark’s, or Brooklyn’s Barclays Center if the league could get it. (New Jersey Devils owner Josh Harris is a Penn alumnus and former wrestler; Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty owner Joe Tsai is a Yale alumnus and major donor.)
“Of course,” Robin Harris said, “I think the Ivy League deserves to be on that kind of stage.”
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The league also has valued the exposure that its men’s and women’s tournaments get by being under the same roof. If they are split up, the men’s tournament likely would draw a bigger crowd. But the women’s teams have higher profiles in their sport, including three NCAA bids in 2024-25 and a nationally ranked Princeton team this season.
“We love how we bring everyone together and we have a true celebration of Ivy League basketball,” said Harris, who also is the managing partner of the 76ers and the NFL’s Washington Commanders. “The athletic directors and the coaches are discussing that as well. … The women’s tournament has really grown and developed, and I don’t get into speculation as to crowd size and what would happen.”