A look back: Last year's story about how Hot Springs put together two courts in one facility

BURN THE HORSE
    How does Hot Springs do it? Here's a look back a story written last year before the Sun Belt Tournament. The biggest change from last year to this year is that Hot Springs no longer has to rent the second court. They've purchased a new court for Summit Arena and moved the old Summit Arena court to the Convention Center:


   Twenty six teams, two courts and one building.
   The Sun Belt Conference will compress a 24-game schedule into four days for its postseason men’s and women’s basketball tournament.
   Summit Arena in Hot Springs is host for the second consecutive year. But the tournament, which begins Saturday morning, has a twist that will make it unique from the other 30 men’s and women’s conference tournaments being held over the next 10 days.
   No other conference can boast as many teams or even as many basketball courts in the same facility.
   Tournament activities get under way at 6:30 tonight at Hot Springs Convention Center with pep bands from all 13 Sun Belt schools participating. The tournament will begin at Summit Arena and the Hot Springs Convention Center after hundreds of elementary school children dribble basketballs up the street to Summit Arena on Saturday morning.
   UALR’s men will face Arkansas State at 6:30 p.m. Saturday at Summit Arena. The Arkansas State women will play at 12:15 p.m. against Troy on Saturday at the convention center court, with the winner playing the top-seeded UALR women at noon on Sunday at Summit Arena.
   The conference will play five women’s and five men’s games Saturday, with five games played on each court. Four men’s and four women’s games will be played Sunday using both courts.
   Work crews started getting the second court ready Thursday morning. Tractor trailers pulled into the convention center’s Exhibit Halls B and C and back out. The court will be set up here with television and other production needs housed in Exhibit Hall A.
   “That’s the convention center court,” said Hot Springs Convention Center Chief Operating Officer Gordon Mahoney said, being careful not to call it the secondary court.
   That’s because the organizers only want the second court to feel secondary in size. They are attempting to turn the 1,500-seat convention center court into a miniature version of the 6,000-seat Summit Arena.
   “We have tried as hard as we can to simulate Summit Arena,” said Rick Mello, the former UALR athletic director and current associate commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference. “Obviously it’s difficult. One’s a convention center space and one is an arena. That was our goal.”
   The basketball court at the convention center is a replica of the one used inside Summitt Arena, constructed by Ohio-based Robbins Sports Surfaces. It arrived this week from Iowa and was installed by Tri-State Floors of Chelsea, Okla., which is the regional installer for Robbins.
   Musco Sports Lighting from Oskaloosa, Iowa, is providing the illumination required for TV broadcasts. Baskets were brought in by Spalding, the same baskets in use at Summit Arena. Spalding recently installed the baskets used for the NBA All-Star Game at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and will also do the Final Four baskets later this year.
   The most difficult item to f ind for the convention center was seats. The Sun Belt Conference didn’t want bleachers and tried to find someone who could do chairback seats. They ended up with the raised chairbacks, similar to what you might find at a PGA Tour event. They rolled in Thursday morning from Virginia.
   “Not a lot of people do this, especially in the numbers that we’re dealing with,” Mello said. “Bleacher systems are much easier, they really are. But they don’t have the same comfort or ambiance. It was important for us to have chairbacks.”
   The first row of seats will be raised 5 feet off the ground, allowing spectators a clear view over the scorer’s and media tables. The scaffolding will be wrapped in blue, similar to the way the PGA Tour wraps its seats around greens.
   About the only thing they couldn’t change was the colors. The seats come in a standard color of green. The paint on the basketball court comes in black. But they’ll work with it.
   Coordination was the big key for Mahoney and his staff as they made plans.
   In February, he brought in the installers for the court, seats, lights and sound system for a meeting. They discussed who would do what then, including which trucks would unload first.
   “We wanted them to understand what had to happen rather than wait until they get here and sort it out at that time,” Mahoney said. “These people do this day in and day out. If you get people who only do this once or twice a year, they might have problems and tell you they’re not going to make it. That is not acceptable. Everybody we’re dealing with is a professional.”
   Then there was another worry, that bad weather could cause shipping delays that would cost valuable time in getting the setup done.
   But by 10:15 a.m. Thursday, Mahoney stepped outside and breathed a sigh of relief.
   “All the components are here, the crews are here and they’re all working. That’s major,” Mahoney said.
   Work started Feb. 21 with installation of lights and prework on the sound system. Once those crews finalized their work Thursday, the installation of the basketball court started. Just a few feet away, a different crew put together the support system for the seats.
   The crews worked around the clock Thursday night, hoping to have a mostly finished product by this afternoon.
   This isn’t the first time the Sun Belt Conference has tried something new with its tournament.
   In 2003, only the top eight teams were invited to Bowling Green, Ky., and teams that got left out weren’t happy. Two courts were used In 2004 at Denton, Texas, with games split between The Super Pit on the North Texas campus and at a gymnasium at Texas Woman’s University. But there was no way for spectators to walk back and forth between courts.
   From 2006 to 2009, first round games were played at campus sites on the Wednesday before the tournament. But this again created issues.
   Teams didn’t know where they were playing on Wednesday until the Sunday before. And the 10 men’s and 10 women’s teams playing on Wednesday didn’t know if they would even make it to the tournament site.
   UALR Athletic Director Chris Peterson was one of the first proponents of using two courts in Hot Springs, which has plenty of convention space attached to Summit Arena. The Sun Belt then devised a bracket in which a school’s men’s and women’s team were unlikely to play at the same time.
   “Our membership thought it was important to bring everybody to Hot Springs so you could plan. But people felt it would be hard to take the tournament beyond four days,” Mello said. “And with this format, everyone will play Saturday or Sunday.”
   Fans attending this weekend will be able to purchase one ticket per session that will enable them to walk back and forth between the two courts. The convention center court will be general admission, while the Summit Arena has general admission and reserved seating.
   For Monday’s semifinals and Tuesday’s championship games, only Summit Arena will be used. And by that time, the convention center court will have already been transformed back into exhibit space.
   “This is what we do,” Mahoney said. “Move one out and move another one in.”