With March Madness just around the corner, the college basketball regular season is coming to a close and the media has had debates about one particular topic, court storming! That’s right, the tradition is now making debates on social media due to incidents that have happened throughout the season.
The topic began when the Iowa Hawkeyes lost to the Ohio State Buckeyes in late January. After overtime, Ohio State fans celebrated with happiness and joy by running onto the basketball court to celebrate the upset. However, seconds after the game ended Iowa’s Caitlin Clark collided with a fan who was storming the court. Clark was ultimately okay after the incident occurred, and she wanted to move on with the season. With Clark’s incident everywhere on social media fans were starting to wonder if the tradition is concerning for future basketball games.
Just last month when Wake Forest upset Duke at home the tradition caused another collision when some of the Wake Forest fans ran into Duke star Kyle Filipowski. Filipowski was given help at the time of the incident due to an ankle injury.
Duke Head Coach Jon Scheyer had strong words against the tradition, “When are we going to ban court storming? How many times does a player have to get into something where they get punched or they get pushed or they get taunted right in their face?”
Both incidents have sparked a huge debate on social media as to whether there should be any consequences or measures to the tradition. If more incidents occur for the remainder of the season, especially during the March Madness tournament, then the tradition could be at greater risk of getting banned from all college basketball arenas. Hopefully, it doesn’t get to that point, but anything can happen with college basketball.
So, where do you stand on the debate? Do you think that court-storming should be banned?
