NCAA Basketball 2013 News: ACC Reconsiders Safety of Court Storming; Is It Too Dangerous?

We've all seen the joy and elation on the faces of the student body as they leap from their seats and stampede onto the hardwood in what has become the tradition of "Court Storming". If you've been lucky enough to have been apart of such an event, you'd know that it leaves an everlasting impression. However, storming the court has lost its luster over the years.

It used to be a time-honored tradition for fans of an unranked team to join the underdogs in a victory celebration. Then, 'storming' slowly evolved to lower seeds beating number ones, unranked beating top three, all the way to where now lower ranked and unbeatens are storming for victories over anyone in the top 10 or even top 20. This drastic change over the last five years has some coaches, players, and AD's frightened for their safety.

Let alone the fact that the frequency of the act seems to have lessened its prestige. We'd like to believe we live in a world where everyone is polite and cordial to one another, but in the frenzy with a thousand heads buzzing about in every which way, there's nothing stopping cruel words or angry fists from flying out towards evading players and coaches who will never know who threw them. 

The ACC plans to have a discussion on player safety directly related to court storming this spring so they can evaluate how to protect their players and how to protect fans from possible retaliation. Let's not forget, the student body is just as much at risk as there have been multiple accounts of students getting trampled beneath stomping feet.

Am I proposing a ban on court storming? Certainly not. But, there are some media outlets that will vehemently defend the act as a harmless tradition by "college idiots", and that is where the danger lies most. The NCAA and its conferences need to sit down and collectively figure out when it is appropriate for court storming to happen, as well as tighten security to ensure that should accidents occur, those poor individuals won't just be left there like a discarded bag of popcorn.