Home Court Advantage: The Impact of South Dakota Teams on Summit League Attendance
The Summit League is a regional collegiate sporting league, based in Sioux Falls, whose member institutions span from the Dakotas to Colorado, and from Minnesota to Missouri. Across all nine institutions, these institutions have a combined enrollment of over 100,000 students, highlighting the large presence held in their home-markets 1. Every year in March, the Summit League hosts an annual men’s and women’s basketball tournament at the Denny Sanford Premier Center in Sioux Falls. During the course of its research, the Dakota Institute came across three major takeaways from the tournament’s presence within Sioux Falls.
First, the 2025 tournament drew a total of 39,500 attendees from across 20 states over 16 games 2. This is on par with the estimated 40,000 attendees in the 2024 tournament, showing the continued strength of the tournament being hosted in Sioux Falls. Second, the cumulative attendance of 2025 tournament games with a South Dakota team present was 1.78 times higher than those games which did not have a South Dakotan team present. Third, the 2025 women’s championship game had 6,500 in attendance compared to only 2,500 in the men’s tournament game. The women’s game featured South Dakota State University (SDSU), while the men’s championship game featured the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) and the University of St. Thomas (UST).
Because of the growing role that this tournament is having within the Sioux Falls metro area, the Dakota Institute decided to conduct a study of the 2024 and 2025 Summit League tournaments to gain insight into the tournament’s attendance and visitor demographics. To conduct this study, the Dakota Institute utilized Placer.AI software which provides detailed analytics on visitor totals for a defined geographic region. In this case, the Dakota Institute used the “event center complex” which includes the Denny Sanford Premier Center and the surrounding parking lots. With this defined region, the software can highlight attendance on an hourly basis, note other locations where attendees frequently visited, and also which zip codes comprised the residential location of those at the event. Placer.AI is based on cell phone location data that is compiled by the company and extrapolated to develop an estimate of the true population.
In Figure 1, it is clear that the vast majority of 2025 attendees are coming from the Upper Midwest — where most of the Summit League member institutions are based. Coming far ahead of any other state, there were approximately 31,563 South Dakotans in attendance over the course of the tournament. The next best represented states were Minnesota (with 2,759 in attendance), Iowa (1,000), and Nebraska (1,223).
All of the states with more than 400 aggregated attendees have a Summit League member within their state. With that trend established, it is worth noting that Colorado — the home of the University of Denver (DU) — has a markedly lower number of attendees at only 110. When compared to SDSU, UST, or most Summit League institutions, DU is one of the institutions furthest away from the tournament’s location in Sioux Falls. The only state with a member institution further than DU, Oklahoma’s Oral Roberts University (ORU) in Tulsa, has attendance less than half of the next lowest state, Missouri (home of the University of Missouri – Kansas City, UMKC), but still over four times more than Colorado.
With this insight, our attendance insights can be shifted from a macro, national level to a game-by-game approach for the 2024 and 2025 tournaments. The Dakota Institute used Placer.AI to develop an hour-by-hour analysis of attendance within the Sioux Falls event center complex region to find the attendance of individual games. In Figures 2 and 3, this data is compiled and separated by tournament. In the effort to show the additive effect of having a South Dakota team present in a game, these games are highlighted in red as opposed to in blue.
It is general wisdom that games later in a tournament have greater attendance. In 2025, for the men’s tournament, this did not materialize. It is clear that this is the by-product of homegrown South Dakota attendance. For the men’s game, occurring at 8:00 PM, the attendance for the UNO / UST game is projected to have been roughly 2,500. For the women’s game, starting a mere five hours earlier, the estimated attendance in the SDSU / ORU game was 6,500. In 2024, on the other hand, both championship games featured SDSU and the attendance figures reflected that. The 2024 men’s championship game had roughly 50% higher attendance than the women’s game, while the 2025 men’s championship game garnered only 38% of the attendance that the women’s game had.
This trend of South Dakota schools bringing attendees continued throughout the 2025 and 2024 tournaments. On average, across the 2024 and 2025 tournaments, games which included South Dakota teams had 67.18% higher attendance than games without a South Dakota team. The Dakota Institute believes this is one of the greatest takeaways from this dataset.
Given the substantial number of attendees from South Dakota, the Dakota Institute was able to conduct a zip code by zip code assessment of where visitors came from within South Dakota. In Figure 4, with aggregated totals across the entire tournament, it is abundantly clear that the south-east corner of the state is the driver behind the 31,563 South Dakotans who attended the tournament. The southern regions of Sioux Falls and the zip codes in the immediate vicinity of SDSU and USD, in particular, made a substantial contribution towards the total attendance. Other regions of Sioux Falls, as well as the Watertown area, were also major drivers of attendees to the tournament. Western South Dakota zip codes, on the other hand, are largely absent from attendance figures.
The data collected by the Dakota Institute highlights the importance of the proximity of a team’s homegrown community to the location of the tournament. There are three key anecdotes from this data which stand to call attention to this phenomenon. First, the tournament drew nearly 40,000 attendees from 20 states — with roughly 30,000 of these attendees being South Dakotan. Second, 2025 tournament games featuring a South Dakota team had on average 1.78 times higher attendance than those without a South Dakota team. Third, the 2024 men’s championship had 50% higher attendance than the women’s championship. In 2025, the men’s tournament had only 38% of the attendance of the women’s championship. These particular games highlight the significance of South Dakota teams advancing far into the tournament and its relationship to the tournament’s overall attendance.
References:
1 https://thesummitleague.org/sports/2020/5/6/about-history-index.aspx
2 Aggregated totals, not unique visitor count.
