As Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes watched the clock wind down on their Elite Eight victory in Albany, N.Y., on Monday evening, a sarcastic apart all of the sudden introduced undesirable consideration to the host metropolis.
With Iowa about to advance to the Remaining 4 within the N.C.A.A. girls’s basketball match, one of many ESPN announcers associated an anecdote about how Clark, Iowa’s famous person capturing guard, had informed her household to depart her alone main as much as the sport and entertain themselves in New York’s capital metropolis. The opposite commentator, Rebecca Lobo, laughed.
“Good luck discovering one thing to do in Albany,” she mentioned.
In a recreation that featured 36 fouls, these eight phrases could have landed the hardest blow. Nearly 14,000 followers packed the MVP Enviornment on Monday, and much more traveled from across the nation to crowd Albany’s accommodations and eating places over the weekend to see among the biggest girls’s faculty basketball groups compete.
Thousands and thousands extra tuned in to the printed. Briefly, all eyes have been on Albany.
Lobo, a former W.N.B.A. star who performed for the College of Connecticut, later apologized, writing on social media that she was accustomed to Albany, having spent various weekends there to teach her youngsters’s sports activities groups.
“No shade meant in direction of the capital metropolis and the excellent job they did internet hosting the regional,” she wrote.
However the harm was executed. Defenders of Albany, together with its mayor, Kathy Sheehan, flocked to social media to specific outrage on the remark.
On Tuesday morning, Ms. Sheehan acknowledged Lobo’s feedback in a submit on X and invited her to journey alongside to among the metropolis’s sights earlier than leaving city.
“There’s loads to do for those who take the time to look,” the mayor wrote.
“Look, I can perceive that individuals coming to Albany, in the event that they’re anticipating a New York Metropolis or another multimillion-person metropolis, that it is a little bit completely different,” Ms. Sheehan mentioned in an interview on Tuesday. “However I feel that we carry an area taste to all the things.”
The regional spherical of the ladies’s match was cut up between two websites this 12 months — Portland, Ore., and Albany — with eight groups competing in every location for a shot to advance to the Remaining 4 in Cleveland. The cities have been chosen in 2021, earlier than the record-setting success of final 12 months’s girls’s March Insanity.
Earlier within the week, L.S.U. coach Kim Mulkey questioned the standard of Albany’s accommodations, questioning aloud whether or not the eight workforce accommodations have been all the similar normal.
“Do you’ve gotten eight accommodations which might be all of equal worth, which might be all the identical?” she requested. “In all probability not. I don’t know what number of cities do.”
Albany isn’t any stranger to criticism. 1 / 4-century in the past, The Occasions Union, Albany’s native newspaper, chronicled the numerous slights towards the town in standard tradition. Three years in the past, the paper provided a companion piece: “9 extra occasions celebrities hated on Albany.”
However disdain does carry some danger: Edward I. Koch, the previous mayor of New York Metropolis, could have doomed his possibilities within the 1982 main for governor when he voiced his hesitation over working as a result of the job “requires dwelling in Albany, which is small-town dwelling at its worst.” Mr. Koch misplaced to Mario M. Cuomo.
In an interview with The Washington Put up, Lisa Peterson, the chair of the Division I girls’s basketball committee for the N.C.A.A., acknowledged Albany’s limitations in internet hosting what was now thought of a significant sporting occasion. Whereas Albany has performed host to each the lads’s and girls’s tournaments in years previous, the town will be troublesome to journey to, she mentioned, and has restricted leisure choices.
These limitations have been on show on Monday evening. Contained in the MVP Enviornment, the Hawkeyes celebrated on the courtroom for near an hour following the ultimate whistle, reveling in mounds of confetti and dancing to upbeat music. However outdoors on the streets of Albany, the companies surrounding the world have been darkish storefronts. The excitement from the courtroom didn’t spill out into the town itself. As soon as once more, Ms. Sheehan pushed again.
“I stay downtown, and after the sport I might have stopped at no fewer than 5 locations between the world and my home,” Ms. Sheehan mentioned. “There have been a number of folks, they have been leaping, it was actually nice to see.”
Regardless of its obvious shortcomings, Albany did handle to attract some star energy from downstate on Monday. The star of “Ted Lasso,” Jason Sudeikis, a famous Brooklynite, stood within the stands carrying a sweatshirt that mentioned, “Everybody watches girls’s sports activities.”
Whereas everybody was watching, the match itself went off and not using a hitch. There have been no complaints from gamers about lodging, and the video games ran easily.
With the match now in Albany’s rearview mirror, the town can flip its consideration to a extra urgent matter: a mysterious odor plaguing its north facet — described by The New York Put up as a “urine-flatulence mixture stench.” An investigation is underway.
