NCAA Women's Tournament: Why it was over 80 degrees inside Carver-Hawkeye Arena for first-round games

The pressure of the Big Dance wasn't the only thing making players from Georgia, Virginia, Iowa and Fairleigh Dickinson sweat on Saturday afternoon. 

Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City does not have air conditioning, and an unseasonably warm day meant the temperature inside the 43-year-old building soared to over 80 degrees with a 26% humidity rate during the first-round games of the 2026 NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament. 

Virginia won a thriller in the first game of the day, defeating Georgia 82-73 in overtime to become just the second team to advance to the second round out of the First Four. 

Per U.S. Climate Data, the average temperature in Iowa City in March is 48 degrees, but it got up to 84 degrees on Saturday, which broke the city's previous record high for March 21 of 78 degrees. The sell-out crowd of over 15,000 only added to the heat inside the arena. 

"That was really cool," Virginia guard Kymora Johnson said of the Iowa fans cheering for Virginia. "Obviously Iowa gets a lot of fans, and it was really cool to see the stadium fill up, although it was very hot."

"What I try to focus on, sometimes to a fault, you just control the controllables," Iowa coach Jan Jensen said earlier this week when asked about the weather. 

"I'm glad you brought it up because maybe I better try to talk about it. I'm older, I'm in my fifties right, so I can be like we can't control that, suck it up. But when you're younger and it is really hot and it's been cold in Carver most of the year because it's winter in the Midwest, might need to chat about it. But I do think the focus will be great. Hydrate up. Both sides will have to have a lot of water if the crowd does heat it up in there. But I think that we'll be pretty smart about we gotta do what we gotta do whether it's 80 or 20," she added.  

This is not the first time that Carver-Hawkeye's lack of air conditioning has been an issue. Last spring, when the Indiana Fever played the Brazilian national team in a WNBA preseason game in the building, former Hawkeyes star Caitlin Clark warned her Fever teammates about the heat. 

"I warned everybody, like, there's no air conditioning in Carver-Hawkeye, and usually they don't play basketball games there in May," Clark said. "So hopefully, hopefully it stays a little cool in there. I don't know what the humidity is looking like, but we'll see how it goes. Might be a little toasty."