ESPN Events moves Diamond Head Classic college hoops to Thanksgiving week – Spectrum News

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HONOLULU — “Feast Week” just got a little more stuffed.
ESPN Events, the operator of the Hawaiian Airlines Diamond Head Classic, is moving the University of Hawaii’s nationally televised men’s basketball tournament to Thanksgiving week starting in 2025, it announced on Monday.
In addition, there will be a women’s tournament component starting next year featuring the Rainbow Wahine basketball team, ESPN Events said in a news release.
Since 2009, the Diamond Head Classic has been played annually on Dec. 22, 23 and 25, except for last year, when the dates were moved up by a single day. It was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A creeping issue has been the expansion of college conferences’ league schedules to the neighborhood of 20 games. Some leagues have elected to play conference games in early December — including UH’s Big West Conference this year.
Tournament organizers are hopeful that, even with Feast Week already including top-tier college hoops events like the Maui Invitational, Battle 4 Atlantis and Players Era Festival, the Diamond Head Classic can carve out a time slot and perhaps beef up its eight-team field that has typically involved mid-majors sprinkled with a few power conference teams.
“Teams typically don’t want to travel this far when they’ve already started conference play,” Daryl Garvin, executive director of the Diamond Head Classic, told Spectrum News in a tunnel of the Stan Sheriff Center.
Dates have not been announced for the shifted men’s event and new women’s event.
One possible scenario involves starting the Diamond Head Classic just after the Maui Invitational, which runs Monday through Wednesday before Thanksgiving. There could be some overlap, but both are ESPN-televised events and spacing them might be ideal.
If that happens, there are other local sporting events to consider like the HHSAA state football championships, UH football, and the Big West women’s volleyball tournament (and in the future, the Mountain West tournament) that have all typically occurred on Thanksgiving weekend.
The Diamond Head Classic is one of 10 college basketball events run by ESPN Events, but that number will apparently increase.
“Women’s sports is exploding,” Garvin said. “I think (with) the popularity of women’s basketball, it just made sense to try to put both together. I think it’s better for the university, better for the community to have both teams involved.”
The UH women’s basketball team has typically played some of its best nonconference competition in its Rainbow Wahine Showdown tournament on the weekend of Thanksgiving week. The four-team field included No. 1 UCLA this year.
Coach Laura Beeman told Spectrum News that the hope is the Showdown can remain in some form on another week to help keep the Wahine home as much as possible. It is not yet clear how many teams the women’s event will include (Beeman hoped eight) and if any of the games will be on national TV.
“I don’t know if we can get there (with national TV) next year, just because of the strength of schedule, what we’re looking at, how quickly this has evolved,” Beeman said. “I trust the direction that Lois (interim athletic director Manin) is going to take this, as far as ESPN is going to take this, and they’re always up for discussion. They haven’t come to me once and said, ‘this is what we’re going to do.’ They’ve been like, ‘hey, how can we make this work for you guys too?’ I can’t appreciate that any more how great ESPN has been to us in this situation, and the Diamond Head Classic folks.”
Brian McInnis covers the state’s sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii. He can be reached at brian.mcinnis@charter.com.

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