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GREENSBORO — Leta Lester arrived at the ACC women’s basketball tournament Friday afternoon the same way she has for the past decade: on crutches.

And Linda Newman, a tournament volunteer, responded in her typical fashion: with a hug and a push.

When Lester pulled up to the Greensboro Coliseum in a friend’s car, Newman helped her into a wheelchair, showed off some pictures of her grandson and rolled Lester off to Section 108, catching up on a year’s worth of news as they went.

From her seat in Row MM,  Lester whooped and hollered for Duke as the Blue Devils battled Maryland.

At halftime, Newman came back to see if she needed anything.

And when the contest ended, she returned to get Lester and roll her back to her waiting vehicle.

As usual, the attention left Lester amazed and grateful.

“You don’t feel like you are just a fan,” said Lester, a critical care nurse at Duke University Medical Center. “You feel like you are family.”

That’s the idea: leave the thousands of visitors who attend the ACC men’s and women’s basketball tournaments feeling as if they’ve come home.

That personal service, some say, is the ingredient that distinguishes Greensboro from other Tournament Town pretenders.

In most cases, that special attention comes courtesy of the Tournament Host Committee of Greensboro, a nonprofit established in 1993 to help the coliseum staff put on ACC and NCAA basketball championships.

The committee connects with visitors through a network of 660 volunteers. They are people such as Newman and her husband, Fred, who is in charge of the wheelchair service.

“As a volunteer community, Greensboro is exceptional,” said Fred Newman, who will have as many as 25 people pushing chairs during the men’s tournament.

He and his wife are among the first to arrive at the coliseum and the last to leave.

“It’s a great feeling,” Linda Newman says of her efforts. “I get an exhilarated exhaustion.”

Says her husband: “It just seems natural to be a volunteer. I don’t even think twice about it.”

But Matt Brown does. The coliseum’s managing director calls the volunteers’ efforts indispensable.

“They help set us apart by bringing a true sense of Southern hospitality to these events,” Brown said in an e-mail. “We couldn’t do it without them.”

You name it; the volunteers do it.

They deliver courtesy cars and welcome gifts to university leaders, coaches and game officials.

They put up welcome banners in the airport and team hotels.

They greet guests during various functions at both tournaments.

They work as guides for team mascots, helping them move about the coliseum in their bulky costumes.

Volunteers also assist during Hoops for Kids, an outreach clinic held last Thursday, and ACC Fan Fest, a free event held before each session of both tournaments.

They serve as team hosts, doing such tasks as making after-dinner reservations for team officials, finding a player a new pair of shoes and washing a team’s laundry.

They staff information booths in team hotels and the coliseum. (The most frequently asked question: “Where’s the nearest ABC store?”)

They provide menus from more than 100 restaurants.

And they help visitors who need wheelchairs.

Some are so impressed with the service that they offer tips.

“They are flabbergasted that we don’t do that,” said Neil Belenky, the former Greensboro United Way president, who volunteers by pushing wheelchairs. “We tell them to give the money to charity.”

In most cities, organizers say, the coliseum staff takes care of such services.

So what’s the difference?

Volunteers aren’t there because it’s their job; they’re there because they want to be.

“You have a genuine smile on your face,” said Marc Bush, president of the Tournament Host Committee “It shows through. I have seen it. I think that sets us apart.”

That translates into a lot of hard work. For some, volunteering is akin to a part-time job — without the pay.

In late March or early April, the 25-member committee overseeing the volunteers will meet to assess how things went during the ACC tournaments. Come summer, they’ll start planning for the 2011 championships, which will be back in Greensboro.

“The better we get, the harder we have to work,” said Richard Beard, chairman of the Tournament Host Committee. “We are never satisfied.”

The result, many visitors say, is that no city can host a tournament the way Greensboro does.

Fans like coming to the Gate City for a variety of reasons: It’s centrally located; the coliseum complex is a spacious and flexible venue; and the tournament is always the big fish in the pond. That’s not the case in Boston, Atlanta or Miami.

Then there’s the hospitality angle.

“I have been to a lot of championships in a lot of different cities,” said John Swofford, the ACC’s longtime commissioner. “All things considered ... I don’t think there is a city in America that puts on collegiate athletic events any more effectively than this one.”

Leta Lester would agree.

“These volunteers give up a whole weekend of their time to push people of all shapes and sizes up those inclines and into the coliseum,” Lester said. “They do this out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s just truly a blessing for people like me.”

Twelve years ago, Lester says, surgery on her one of her feet left her “partially handicapped.”

She knows she can count on Linda Newman to get her to the steps that lead to her seat. She can do the rest.

“I truly believe that if I got to the point that I had to be carried to my seat, some of them would give it the old college try.”

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 3373-7027 or don.patterson@news-record.com