Hockey to Basketball Time-Lapse from DU Clarion
The DU Clarion has an interesting article today on converting Magness from an ice hockey facility to a basketball arena. It costs $4,250 to convert the seating & flooring and its done 120 times a year.
8 comments:
Think of the money they would save if they kept more games in Hamilton
By my math it costs a half-million dollars a year to convert Magness. A staggering figure that would never occur to you.
Obviously this is another cost of maintaining a Division I Men's & Women's hoops program.
DU promised Joe Scott that all men's games would be in Magness, so this is the cost of doing business.
You can't get good recruits to come if you play hoops in Hamilton Gym - it's no different than a high school gym with a better scoreboard.
$15.3M over a 30 year period. It seems like you could invest that money in a basketball/volleyball-specific arena and make a much better ROI on a hard asset. I know that land scarcity and thousands of other factors play into the decision to construct a building like another Magness, but it just seems like such a waste to dump $0.5M into converting the floor back and forth 120 times each year.
DU is pretty landlocked into it's footprint, so a seperate hoopx arena doesn't work.
If they can get to 4,000 fans per game for men's hoops, the point becomes moot, as seating demand would exceed Hamilton's capacity.
If they get to the NCAA tourney in the next couple of years (very possible), I could see DU averaging 4,000 per game.
Woemn's hoops is the one sport will probably never need Magness.
It's a nice article - unfortunately it came across as sort of disclosing facts, & figures; but I think it was really supposed to give props to the conversion crew. All stadiums & venues have these kind of unsung people who need to be recognized more often. What about the guys who run the penalty box during hockey? Or the people who clean every single row of seats after each event. Things most people just take for granted (as the article said).
Why not use the money and transform Hamilton into something usable for the basketball, volleyball, gymnastics teams?
Hamilton is "usuable" by those teams now, but it's just a gym, not an arena.
There is no real physical room to expand Hamilton, and even if you installed individual seating instead of bleachers, you'd have no gain in capacity - probably less people than it holds now (Hamilton hold about 3,000 now).
I think this will all be moot once DU starts making NCAA tourney appearances in hoops and we can get 4,000 people per game.
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