In what signifies America’s most far-reaching annual sporting spectacle, the NCAA men’s basketball championship — better known as March Madness — invades cities across the country, filling arenas and stadiums with thousands of fans. Along the way, the NCAA has a definitive plan to keep the experience, both in-venue and on television screens the world over, on brand. That takes planning. Plenty of it.
While the tournament always starts with a “first four” at the University of Dayton Arena in Ohio, it expands beyond there, often growing in venue capacity for each round of play. This year, four arenas host the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games between March 23 and 26 and University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona takes on the challenge of hosting the Final Four, consisting of the semifinals on April 1 and the NCAA Championship Game on April 3.
The planning in Phoenix takes on a completely different approach, especially as officials must convert a football stadium into a basketball venue, while still accommodating the roughly 75,000 ticket holders for a Final Four event that hasn’t come west of Texas in over 20 years.
Tom Sadler, president and CEO of University of Phoenix Stadium, owned by Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority, and leader of the Phoenix Final Four bid committee, said the engineering alone of setting up for basketball presents a challenge. The NCAA will bring in more than 16,000 temporary seats that surround the floor, which is elevated less than three feet to improve sightlines, and overlay into the permanent seating—covering about 5,500 of the permanent seats—until a seamless transition between temporary and fixed occurs. And since the Glendale, Ariz., stadium features a retractable roof, it took an engineering plan to install the video board the NCAA owns over the playing surface. From there, you have logistics of bringing power to the floor, along with the game day needs of basketball.
“There are always going to be challenges to accommodate the unique features of any event,” Sadler said. “We meet with the NCAA and get the lay of the land of what they need to do and then make suggestions and they make the final decisions. It is a good relationship.”
While accommodating the intense throng of media surrounding the event, along with the variety of VIP requirements, certainly takes planning, Sadler said it proves no more daunting than what the stadium has handled in the past, especially considering the building hosted the Super Bowl in 2016. “We accommodate any guest at our highest level,” Sadler said. “We have a number of options and tools at our disposal because of the way the stadium is configured. We are able to prepare for (any VIP need).”
While University of Phoenix Stadium may have the biggest stage of those hosting games in the 2017 tournament, even basketball-ready arenas spend 15 months prepping for the arrival of the NCAA.
This is nothing new, though, as the NCAA hands each venue a manual to work from, said James Hamnet, director of booking and events for San Jose, Calif.’s SAP Center, one of the four arenas hosting the Sweet 16/Elite 8. “It is almost like a checklist for how to put on a basketball game,” he said. “It simplifies the process.”
Joel Fisher, executive vice president of MSG Marquee Events for New York City’s Madison Square Garden, said they are set up for any VIP or media event.
From the Fedex Forum in Memphis to the Sprint Center in Kansas City, the template remains the same, venues must provide a “clean” backdrop within the seating bowl. While easier for buildings with fully digital signage, some—such as University of Phoenix Stadium—must physically cover branding not consistent with NCAA sponsors. The level of clean branding stretches right down to the packaging for food and beverage, too.
“We can’t have SAP Center napkins or Round Table Pizza boxes, you need to go generic with those items,” said Hamnet. “We don’t have to stop selling, we just can’t put them in branded containers, which is pretty easy to accommodate.” Anything entering the seating bowl must comply.
Brenda Tinnen, general manager of Sprint Center, said the consistency in signage extends beyond the seating bowl too, ensuring that from the airport to the venue entrances, the NCAA visuals remain intact. In Kansas City, that requires printing new signage to accommodate the 400 members of the press in a portion of the building otherwise used for storage and moving four teams around the building in different ways than typically accomplished.
The March Madness venues don’t make lofty changes to the food service — Tinnen did note her chef will make sure the venue has something unique for each school or region represented — but they do have to eliminate alcohol from the public areas. The venues can serve alcohol in the private hospitality and suites, but only where athletes or students don’t have access. And they cannot reorder alcohol while games are on, so restocking must occur during the middle of the night.
“Of course we would love to serve alcohol,” Tinnen said. “Sure, it hurts (the per cap rate), but I respect the wishes of the NCAA.” She added that it is frustrating to see fans linger outside her building in the entertainment district longer, causing a crush of fans entering the game directly before tip after having already consumed an ample amount of alcohol. “I hate to tell a guest, ‘No, I can’t do this for you,’” she said.
As part of the bid process, the NCAA requires each venue to work with a “host” school or conference. “They are pretty key, they understand the collegiate world,” said Hamnet, who has partnered with the Pac-12 Conference to turn his hockey-first venue into a basketball arena. “They are key in executing (the event) because they understand this world and they live it every day.”
From the logistics of knowing what a basketball team needs coming into a market from landing the plane at the airport to routing through hotels and practice court needs at other sites, the host schools and conferences can help. In Phoenix, for example, Arizona State University handles everything from media operations at the stadium to the scoreboard operation, not to mention having ASU students join with the local organizing committee helping promote and staff ancillary events.
The Sprint Center, which hosts the Big 12 Championship each year, and Madison Square Garden, host to St. John’s basketball and the Big East Championship, have relationships with schools and conferences that have given the buildings years of institutional knowledge on hosting large-scale tournaments.
With a years-long bidding process, months of pre-event planning, weekly phone calls with the NCAA and plenty of pre-game prep, what draws venues to clamor for the right to host the NCAA tournament? It comes down to every venue wanting to host the biggest events available while bolstering building resumes.
“To be the world’s most famous arena, you need to continue to do events like this for the fans, for the people of New York,” Fisher said. “It is important to do high-profile historic events.”
New York and Kansas City both proved that true, selling out their ticket allotments within days. “Kansas City has hosted more NCAA Final Fours than any other city,” Tinnen said. “The Final Four started in Kansas City, and the people of Kansas City really do support college basketball. Really, there is civic pride. There is great basketball to watch and a great city experience. It is an infomercial for not only Kansas City, but the Sprint Center, that we are not out here in the middle of a pasture with hay bales and cows all around us, but we are definitely a city on the move and a fun place to visit.”
In Phoenix, Sadler said the Final Four fulfills a promise. The creation of the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority came with a promise that Phoenix would host some of the highest profile events possible, such as the College Football Championships (2015), the Super Bowl (2008, 2016) and Final Fours. “So, we are making good on that promise,” he said. Secondly, though, Sadler said the event offers exposure to Arizona as a destination, for people who have never before visited Phoenix, which brings both short- and long-term economic impact.
From New York City to San Jose and Kansas City to Phoenix, venue managers work for months to follow NCAA guidelines, provide clean buildings and prep for basketball for the sake of hosting one of the premier annual sporting events. The prep, they say, pales in comparison to joining a historic event that draws fans from all across the country.
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PREPPING FOR MARCH MADNESS
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