RALEIGH, N.C. — Sixty-nine years after its founding in a smoke-filled room inside of the old Sedgefield Inn, the ACC is leaving the city and relocating its headquarters to Charlotte, the league announced on Tuesday.
The conference’s board of directors, made up of presidents and chancellors of all 15 of the ACC’s members, finalized in recent weeks what the ACC described as a “unanimous” decision. The league will move its offices to Charlotte in 2023, ending a nearly 70-year run in which its home was in the city of its birth.
“The board is strong in our belief that this relocation is in the best interest of the ACC,” Vincent Price, the Duke president and chairman of the conference’s board of directors, said during a conference call Tuesday morning. “We’re excited about the significant opportunities this will afford the conference and all of our member institutions.
“We were not without being mindful of the fact that we have been located in Greensboro for the last 70 years. This was not an easy decision for the board as we recognize the truly wonderful relationship we’ve had with Greensboro. But we are thrilled that we’re remaining in North Carolina.”
The ACC’s new home will be in Legacy Union’s Bank of America Tower in Uptown Charlotte. The building includes the world headquarters of Honeywell and several other prominent companies, including Bank of America, Deloitte and Parker Poe, hold offices in Legacy Union.
The announcement brings an end to a process that lasted about a year and a half. When Jim Phillips became the ACC’s commissioner in February 2021, he made it a priority to evaluate whether the conference should remain headquartered in Greensboro or if it should find a new home.
Newmark, a consulting firm, assisted the ACC in what it described as an “objective, data-driven comparison and evaluation” among the finalists, which included Charlotte, Greensboro and Orlando. The cities were measured on criteria, according to the league, that included having an Eastern Time zone location, positive growth trends in population size, population diversity, “access to a large hub airport” and “anticipated benefit to the overall ACC brand.”
‘A very difficult decision’
In the most recent state budget, North Carolina lawmakers agreed to give the ACC $15 million to remain in North Carolina for the next 15 years. To receive the money, the agreement requires the ACC to hold at least four men’s basketball tournaments, four women’s basketball tournaments and four baseball tournaments in the state within the next 10 years, in addition to holding any championships in North Carolina that are already on the schedule.
Phillips on Tuesday said he had “no hesitancy at all” that the conference would meet its end of that deal. He also described leaving Greensboro as “a very difficult decision.”
In Charlotte, though, the conference and the leaders of its members saw greater opportunity. Phillips cited various data points that led the ACC to its decision, including ones concerning air travel and Charlotte’s reputation as a hub for business.
Greensboro’s Piedmont Triad International Airport, in particular, was seen as a weak point in that city’s bid to keep the ACC. The airport offered few direct flights to ACC cities outside the region, and travel there from the farthest reaches of the conference could be arduous. In recent years, Charlotte has become more of a regular destination for some of the ACC’s annual events.
The league’s annual football and basketball media days are there every year. The conference championship game in football has found a regular home at Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium.
“Charlotte Douglas International is the fifth busiest airport in the world,” Phillips said. “We have right around, maybe a little more than, 80,000 ACC graduates that live in the Charlotte region. There’s home to nearly 500 global and regional headquarters in the city and city land area.
“So those are part of the data driven (analysis), as well as other elements that were deeply considered by the board.”
Leaving ACC’s roots
In leaving Greensboro, though, the ACC is leaving behind history and deep roots.
The league was founded there May 8, 1953, in the inn on the grounds of the Sedgefield Country Club, about 10 miles southwest of downtown. Leaders from Clemson, Duke, Maryland, N.C. State, North Carolina, South Carolina and Wake Forest then decided to break away from the Southern Conference and form a new league.
When they emerged from behind closed doors in the wee hours of the morning, smoke billowed out into the hall. The scene “was right out of something Hollywood would write, I guess,” Irwin Smallwood, a longtime reporter for the Greensboro Daily News, told The N&O in an interview last year. Smallwood in 1953 was a young reporter who found himself at Sedgefield, covering the birth of a conference.
“It was the quintessential smoke-filled room,” he said. “My recollections are the door opened about 1:15 in the morning and out came all the leaders of those seven schools saying the deed is done, knowing damn well we’d already gone to press.”
There wasn’t much debate, in those days, about where the league’s headquarters would be located. The first iteration of the ACC’s headquarters consisted of a two-employee operation, based out of Greensboro’s long-demolished King Cotton hotel. The conference eventually moved into a larger office near downtown Greensboro before relocating in the mid-1990s to an office just outside of the Grandover Resort.
These days the ACC has about 50 employees. The league has left some positions open in recent months, waiting for the decision that was finalized Tuesday. The rest of the 2022-23 academic year will be used as a “transition year,” Phillips said, before the move to Charlotte is complete.
