Behind-the-scenes look at how Capital One Arena changes over for events
A behind-the-scenes look at the Capital One Arena changeover
Capital One Arena hosts over 200 events every year. NBA, NHL, College Basketball and concerts are all on the calendar. Arenas are built for flexibility, but it takes plenty of labor to be able to change from day to day. FOX 5's David Kaplan goes behind the scenes to take a look at how the arena staff does it.
WASHINGTON - Capital One Arena hosts over 200 events every year. NBA, NHL, College Basketball and concerts are all on the calendar.
Arenas are built for flexibility, but it takes plenty of labor to be able to change from day to day.
Saturday, there were two events.
At 11:30 a.m. Saturday, the Syracuse Orange tipped off against the Georgetown Hoyas in another chapter of one of College Basketball’s storied rivalries.
At 7 p.m. Saturday, in the same arena, the Washington Capitals faced off against the New York Rangers.
"There’s a lot of moving parts," said Darius Dunn, Assistant General Manager of Arena Operations at Capital One Arena.
The transitions are all different, but require the same amount of teamwork, coordination and hard work.
"Managers, supervisors, take individual teams that take sort of specialty in their areas, and they kind of get in there," Dunn said.
It’s a complex symphony of tearing one sport down and building another up.
Different groups have different teardown responsibilities and eventually transition into building the next version of the arena.
As soon as the final buzzer sounded in the Syracuse-Georgetown game, cleanup crews started getting trash out of the seats. Simultaneously, premium seating chairs were folded up and taken away, the baskets removed and the court broken down, loaded onto pallets and put into a storage area.
Dunn says a normal crew is about 30 to 40 people. For today’s accelerated move, some extra support:
"We add a few extra bodies, just to kind of make sure to account for the compressed time a little bit, so we may add a few extra bodies from some other sources to help out," Dunn said.
Once hockey season starts, the ice and most of the hockey boards remain. For a basketball game and concerts, there’s insulation that keeps the ice cool while protecting it, and courts or concert seating is built out on top of that.
For Saturday’s transition from basketball to hockey, once all the seats and baskets and floor are put away, the crews take that layer of insulation off and a person who’s expertise is ice does about 45 minutes of work to get it NHL-Ready.
These crews typically work overnights 5 or 6 nights a week, Dunn says. But not only was Saturday a condensed transition, but the changeover team had to be back around midnight to prepare the arena for a Sunday concert.