They did not disguise themselves or throw imported tea overboard. But an ambitious group of college faculty and athletic representatives still made quite a splash when, in May 1953, they declared independence from the Southern Conference at Greensboro’s Sedgefield Inn.

The decision to form a new league among schools sharing high athletic and academic aspirations soon revolutionized sports in the Southeast and altered college basketball, and in the process brought Greensboro enduring recognition and respect.

“The ACC definitely helps with our presence in the national marketplace,” says Henri Fourrier, president and CEO of the Greensboro Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. “There’s a pride here in Greensboro. We see the Atlantic Coast Conference as a huge asset, and I think the community shows that.”

Except for an early, temporary stay in Durham, league headquarters has resided in Greensboro, moving from downtown’s King Cotton Hotel to Battleground Avenue and later to Wendover Avenue. Today the ACC operates from its own 18,000-square-foot freestanding home just off a fairway at the Grandover Resort and Conference Center. “Greensboro was at the geographic center of the conference,” explains John Swofford, commissioner of the ACC, “and it was not in the hometown of any one school.”

As Greensboro and the region grew, so did the ACC, expanding from a North Carolina-dominated group of seven schools eager to bolster their football prowess to a dozen members spanning the Eastern Seaboard, still raring to improve their football stature. The original members were Clemson University, Duke University, University of Maryland, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, N.C. State University, University of South Carolina, and Wake Forest University.

Eventually the ACC took in Boston College, Florida State University, Georgia Tech, University of Miami, University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech. South Carolina withdrew in 1971. “Ironically, as the years have gone by and the conference has expanded to Atlanta and to Tallahassee - and in a broader scope to Boston and to Miami - basically Greensboro continues to be in the geographic center of the league,” Swofford says.

Greensboro is central in other ways because, despite every effort to the contrary, the ACC remains foremost a basketball-focused conference.

The ACC has produced some of the game’s greatest stars, from N.C. State’s David Thompson to UNC’s Michael Jordan to Wake Forest’s Tim Duncan. Six of its coaches are members of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and three still work the sidelines - Kay Yow for the N.C. State women, and on the men’s side Mike Krzyzewski at Duke and Roy Williams at UNC.

ACC men’s basketball teams have won 10 NCAA champion-ships since 1957, when Frank McGuire’s North Carolina Tar Heels finished the season undefeated - in the process capturing the enduring interest of the state via a nascent medium called television. The women have won two NCAA crowns. Nine of the men’s titles and one of the women’s were captured by teams from Duke, UNC, and N.C. State.

Cumulatively, ACC men have the highest conference winning percentage in NCAA tournament competition, with 38 ACC squads reaching a Final Four. The women sent another 14.

ACC members have a historic familiarity with tournament play. The old Southern Conference, with its multitude of teams and unbalanced regular season schedules, needed a postseason tournament to determine a champion. The ACC was founded in part to avoid such conditions, creating a level playing field on which each football team faced every other school once per season and basketball teams played home-and-home annually.

While a tournament was not necessary from a competitive standpoint in the new ACC, it was a popular attraction for players, fans, and media members. Perhaps most important, a single-elimination championship provided a lucrative source of revenue for the fledgling conference. Early on, the ACC Tournament was mocked for squandering teams’ energy and jeopardizing the advance of the most deserving squad. Other than N.C. State’s Everett Case, who won the first three titles, ACC coaches lobbied publicly against the event. “The tournament is like a plane crash,” grumbled then-Wake Forest coach Murray Greason. “You go down once, and you’re a goner.”

Then ACC entrants started winning in the NCAAs - sending eight teams to a Final Four between 1957 and 1969 - even as the ACC Tournament became a sellout in 1965. Since then, it has remained a tough ticket, a showcase for exceptional players and teams, a grand social gathering, and a regular feature on television. Nowadays, virtually every conference hosts a similar event, but none is more respected or enveloped in tradition than the ACC Tournament.

And no city is more closely associated with the ACC Tournament than Greensboro. The men’s ACC Tournament was played in the Greensboro Coliseum 21 times between 1967 and 2006, more than any other venue, and is slated to return five times in six years from 2010 through 2015. With uncommon foresight, the city has expanded the arena and added auxiliary exhibition space in order to remain in the mix as a tournament site.

“The ACC is a league that is tradition, history, in which everything that’s gone on for whatever it is, 60 years now, is really important,” says UNC’s Roy Williams, who at 57 is two years older than the ACC. “And some of those big, big games have happened in Greensboro in the Greensboro Coliseum, [including] the old coliseum, the ACC Tournament, the Big Four Tournament, all those tournaments.”

From business organizations to volunteer groups, Greensboro has embraced its host role for ACC events, to notable effect.

“It takes over the entire city, and Greensboro welcomes that,” Swofford says, approvingly. “When the men’s tournament is here, or the women’s tournament, it’s the event going on. Nothing can compare with it at that point in time. In some of the larger cities there’s always going to be something else that is going on and competes with it, just by those cities’ very nature.”

From 1954 through 1966 the ACC Tournament was played in Raleigh at N.C. State’s Reynolds Coliseum, and from 1967 through 1975 off-campus in either Greensboro or Charlotte. Then it traveled for a year to Landover, Maryland, to foster a greater sense of inclusion among non-North Carolina members. The ACC Tournament subsequently returned to Landover and has been played in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Tampa.

But it always comes back to Greensboro.

Miami coach Frank Haith, who grew up in Burlington, likes it that way. He says “the tournament should be played in Greensboro every year.”

In the women’s case, it is.

The ACC women’s tournament has remained in Greensboro since 2000, and will stay for the foreseeable future. Attendance per game has nearly doubled in seven years, fed by - and in turn feeding - the growing popularity of the women’s game. Last year’s tournament drew nearly 70,000 fans, more than any similar league tournament.

Average attendance for the 11 contests played March 1-4, 2007 exceeded the average regular season attendance at all but one ACC venue. “I think our schools are very, very happy with the growth that it has enjoyed here, and how they are treated when they come here,” Swofford says of the women’s tournament.

Citing more than 30 years of professional experience attending similar events nationwide, he adds, “I don’t know anywhere that puts on a basketball tournament at a collegiate level, all things considered, any better than the people here at Greensboro.”

Success with the ACC’s basketball tournaments has made Greensboro an attractive venue for NCAA competition as well. Various rounds of the NCAA men’s tournament have been played at the coliseum 10 times, including the 1974 Final Four at which N.C. State won its first national championship.

Efforts are under way, supported by $2 million in state funds, to create an “ACC Hall of Champions” at or near the Greensboro Coliseum. Marketing studies predict an ACC museum would attract 200,000 to 250,000 visitors per year, bolstering the city’s profile as a tourist destination.

“Greensboro and the ACC have become synonymous in many people’s minds,” Swofford says. “Greensboro has been good for the ACC, and the ACC has been good for Greensboro. It simply has worked in both directions.”

Barry Jacobs, a writer who lives outside Hillsborough, has covered ACC basketball since 1976 for numerous state and national publications. His most recent book, Across The Line, tells the story of the first African-American players in the ACC and SEC.