After a seven year run at the United Center, the McDonald’s High School All-American Game will be hosted in a different city next year, a report says.
That report, from Crain’s Chicago Business, says that the company thinks the game being in the same city for nearly a decade has caused it to get a “little stale.”
“We’re going to try to get back to the roots,” McDonald’s Head of Global Alliances John Lewicki said at the SBJ-Intersport Brand Engagement Summit in Chicago on Thursday. “We learned a lot on how to run it more efficiently, but it also became a little stale. We need to get that freshness back.”
After poor ticket sales for the 2017 edition of the game, things got even worse when a brawl on a United Center concourse was captured on video.
The game was held in Chicago for the first time back in 2011, with Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and James McAdoo sharing game MVP honors. In the last edition, which the West team won 109-107 in March, Michael Porter Jr. from Nathan Hale High School in Missouri was named the game’s MVP.
