Barclays Center Part 3: The Conversion Crew That Transforms the Venue for Events
Released on 06/25/2013
(upbeat music)
As the crowd enters for the Nets game,
it's the smell of popcorn and hot dogs,
and the announcer introducing the teams.
The cheer of the crowd, and they have no idea that
the night before, the conversion crew was
working feverishly to completely change over the building
from a sold-out concert into Nets basketball.
(upbeat music)
The conversion crew, they're the unsung heroes.
Nobody sees them.
Their job is to go from concert mode into basketball.
The team's gonna be in at eight o'clock,
and they can't know that there was a concert here.
When the concert ends, the first thing that the
conversion crew does is they take the floor
and remove all the chairs, we call that chair strike.
As soon as the chair strike is done,
we'll start to work on TD platforms,
larger pressed sections.
They're like small structures themselves
where you might have four or five guys on it
for four hours to complete it.
Barclays Center has two truck elevators
to bring vehicles into the arena.
They're 85 feet long, and they hold 85,000 pounds each.
The truck pulls out onto a turntable that's 95 feet across.
We turn the turntable so the trucks line up
with one of the four bays, and then they can back in.
It is a choreographed dance, with forklifts coming
back and forth and trailer trucks spinning
on the turntable and going to the truck elevators.
They're the only way in and out of the building
for anything that won't fit through the front door.
It's about three or four in the morning before
our team can really take the floor and start to focus
on the basketball installation.
(upbeat music)
This floor is a zipper.
It starts with one row down the middle,
and then you can split off both north and south with
two separate crews, so you can build it more efficiently.
We have 40 conversion workers,
then two full-time supervisors.
We'll line our center row down, that'll be row A.
The north side is single letters on our court pieces,
and the south side is double letters.
And they'll roll out in a sequence,
each piece, slammed in and pinned, slammed in and pinned,
until you finish on opposite corners of the court.
The work, it's extremely physical.
It can be demanding on the body.
They have to make sure that every line on that court
lines up perfectly.
[Matt] The expectations are perfection.
The amount of money that goes out onto that basketball
floor with player salaries, a court has to be safe.
There can't be any trip hazards or any gaps.
I think that's where the pressure comes in.
But we can go into any situation
and be successful overnight.
We were doing conversions, it took us 15-20 hours,
and now we're doing it in six to eight.
We like to get done before anybody else shows up.
I even caught a couple of the Nets players on occasion,
coming in early and walking down on the side of the court
and checking it out, and I don't think they even know
all the love that goes into putting that court together
that they play on every night.
[Matt] After the conversion is complete,
we're 100% ready for basketball.
Court is down, the hoops are up, all the seats are in place,
and the building's ready for the Nets game that night.
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