Baltimore will keep CIAA tournament through 2029, officials announce

An annual basketball tournament held during Black History Month and bringing a wide economic footprint will stay in Baltimore through the end of the decade, local officials announced.

Public and private sector leaders on Wednesday gathered at the Baltimore Visitor Center in the Inner Harbor to announce the city won the bid to host the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) competition from 2027 to 2029. Baltimore has hosted the popular HBCU tournament since 2022, a start date that was delayed a year by the pandemic. 

Competition is intense to host the event, which features games between historically Black colleges and universities throughout the mid-Atlantic and Southern United States.

With this latest win, Baltimore notably beat out Charlotte, North Carolina, which hosted the CIAA between 2006 and 2020. 

At the announcement, many speakers — including leaders from CIAA members Bowie State University and Lincoln University, Baltimore-based sports apparel giant Under Armour, Maryland’s Department of Commerce, tourism arm Visit Baltimore and insurance company CareFirst — highlighted the tournament’s impact and significance beyond the court.

“My favorite part of this relationship is the deep investment into community,” said Mayor Brandon Scott. “The CIAA goes all out: financial literacy, health summits, skills camps … so that we’re growing the generation of CIAA graduates to come back to Baltimore and go into communities to help make us the best version of ourselves.” 

This impact extends to the city’s business and startup communities, which each earned a major spotlight during prior tournaments. In 2024, the city saw a total economic impact of $32.5 million, including $23.6 million in direct spending, according to Visit Baltimore. Al Hutchinson, the tourism agency’s outgoing CEO (whom Mayor Scott recognized at the end of the Wednesday press conference), previously said that the tournament generated $81.7 million in total economic impact and funded an average of 1,326 jobs each year between 2022 and 2024. 

The 2025 financial figures dropped a little, with this year’s tournament boasting $19.8 million in direct spending and $27.4 million in total economic impact. That said, the number of jobs created, by Visit Baltimore’s tally, grew to 1,487. 

For the innovation community, the tournament offered the chance to showcase Baltimore’s Black technologists, entrepreneurs and other sector players during the annual Tech Summit House program. The series of talks and pitch contests revolving around topics like AI, Africa’s startup world and how to navigate an industry filled with racist disparities dovetailed with local boosters’ broader goal of highlighting this predominantly Black city’s unique assets.

“The tournament particularly uplifts Black-owned businesses, highlights our HBCU legacy,” Hutchinson previously told Techncal.ly, “and adds to the vibrant mix of music, arts and culture that define Baltimore’s Black community.”  

Although he didn’t speak during Wednesday’s presser, Mark Anthony Thomas, CEO and president of the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC), said he took part in a pitch to host the tournament last week. He and others only found out about the acceptance this week. 

For Thomas, the fact that none of Baltimore’s HBCUs are in the CIAA (the closest being Bowie State in Prince George’s County, near DC) was actually an asset. 

“The most successful ends are when you don’t have the natural advantages of other markets,” Thomas told Technical.ly before the press conference. “We don’t have any of the CIAA schools, we’re not central to where they’re located. And it means that Baltimore overperforms on charm, our ability to be collaborative and a great partner with the CIAA — and we actually put on a good show.”  

Just a day earlier, Thomas held a fireside chat at the GBC’s Inner Harbor offices with Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the New York City-based Center for an Urban Future. For nearly an hour, the pair spoke before GBC members about topics including the growth of New York’s tech economy, the Great Recession’s lessons in economic diversification and what Baltimore can learn from the country’s biggest city. 

One theme Bowles hit on was the importance of the cultural sector to a city’s development. Thomas connected this to the current bid, and the way Baltimore’s economy can build upon the prior tournaments.  

“In our 10-year plan, creative and culture is one of the three opportunity areas, so this is central to that type of potential we see for the region,” he said. “Obviously, it’s a risk. Visit Baltimore initially pursued this, and so you think about the risk they took — to even believe that Baltimore had a chance at competing for this — and for it to have been successful, now twice, is a huge endorsement of the infrastructure they built.” 

Those interested in learning more about the fireside can find our coverage by signing up for Technical.ly’s community Slack and visiting the #baltimore channel.