Metamorphosis on ice

Just how elastic a modern sports arena can be is captured in the photos above, which show 45 crew members changing the Kohl Center’s expression from basketball to hockey in the same day. So many foldable chairs are removed – 1,500 – that it makes the teardown of a church picnic seem like, well, a picnic. Location-coded sheets of hardwood are gently removed, then insulating panels are forklifted away to reveal the inch-and-a-half of ice sitting ready for another round of skate mutilation. Walls and plastic glass are erected to ensure separation of whizzing players and stationary fans, and – voila! – wood to ice in a cool four hours.

It was, in arena lingo, a “pressured conversion.” At the Kohl Center on a recent Saturday afternoon, the pressure was building not only on the men’s basketball team playing right then, but also on eight crews of workers quietly assembling in the bowels of the arena.

Those 45 workers (mostly students) were about to begin their own contest against a formidable opponent: the clock. Once the basketball game ended, they had to transform the arena floor from wood to ice in the lickety-split time of four hours flat.

That’s the tiny peephole of opportunity they had between the end of the basketball game and the beginning of the hockey game that evening. And the conversioneers did it with skill, speed and aplomb.

Led by overall crew chief Gregg Knudson, they poured onto the parquet floor minutes after the final buzzer of the basketball game. These arena gladiators were armed with tool wagons, chair carts, forklifts – and a color-coded script.

“The script shows what each of the eight crews has to do in which sequence and how many minutes it should take,” says Mike Huffman, operations manager at the Kohl Center.

They’ve gotten very good at it since the center opened a year ago; so far their fastest floor-switch for basketball-to-hockey has been three hours, 15 minutes. Up to a point, the bigger the crew, the faster the conversion, “but there’s a fine line between just enough and too many so they’re getting in each other’s way,” says Huffman.

This choreographed ballet features two major movements: unhooking the 4- by-8-feet sheets of hardwood basketball floor, and hauling off the “polar floor,” the 4-feet-square insulating panels that sit on the ice and support the basketball floor. (The ice is made only once a year before hockey season, not for each game.) That brute-force hauling is accompanied by three hours of electrical work.

When converting to hockey, the workers also add the players boxes, penalty box, protective glass and additional seating on the ends. That seating creates what Huffman calls “the challenge of converting sightlines.”

Add seating in front, and you have to raise the rest of the seats higher by variable heights (the first row by 7 feet and the last row by 2 inches). The push of a button takes care of it all by activating an ingenious Italian-made seating system.

If the conversion isn’t “pressured” in the same day, then the crews often have to work the wee hours to change floors between events in the evening and the next day. “The work is hard and the hours terrible,” says Huffman, “but the crews have a real sense of camaraderie and accomplishment. We’re very proud of what they do for the university.”