Carver Renovations
- Thread starter hawkeye_fan321
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This is a very interesting thread to me. I think the Big Ten schools have done a terrible job of dealing with their basketball arenas, much worse than relative to the football stadiums, and this is coming from a Minnesota fan. (Minn. let their very large and historic brick stadium decay for 30 plus years, spending not a dime on it, then moved to the cheapest, most sterile, stale place ever, the Metrodome, using the "poor' condition of Memorial Stadium as an excuse to do it - PS then managed to negotiate the worst lease known to man) Thankfully those days are long gone.
I am old enough to remember seeing games on TV from the Fieldhouse, and recall the post Lute teams playing a couple of games at the Fieldhouse early in the season (Payne, Stokes team) because CHA was not ready as expected. I sensed immediately that something important was lost forever for Iowa, as I had heard the Fieldhouse was finished, and was mesmerized to see it in front of me on TV, getting one more night of glory.. Sure enough, later that year when I saw a game on TV from CHA, the atmosphere was lacking. Having said that, when Iowa is good, CHA is pretty good, and way better than at some other places, where they spent a lot of money and ended up with crap. On TV the dead spaces around the court and lack of any student energy is what stands out. It is amazing how a 1970's Arena like Hilton, that as a NBA venue would have been bulldozed 20 years ago, seems so current. Iowa could make things better at CHA, but closing the concourse off is not a great idea, unless it is part of a very big renovation.
Some of the worst Big Ten arenas are the "new" ones like at UW, Ohio State and Penn State, graded on a "curve" of course. They spent a ton of money on these places and they are awful. No energy, seats far from the floor, bad sightlines, and worthless "hockey" seats facing where the goalie would be. The exception to this is the Breslin Arena at MSU, they did this one right.
The Ohio State facility is so vanilla and awful that everyone got excited a couple of years ago when they were forced by a conflict to play a game in the old St. John Arena next door, and there was once again some excitement and atmosphere at OSU. St. John Arena looks like a slightly smaller version of Williams Arena on TV, but in reality it was built in the early 50's and has much better bones.
The other exception is the Maryland Arena, built in the ACC era, and by far the best arena in the Big Ten. Edit, I forgot Nebraska, Maryland and Nebraska are 1A and !B, not sure of order. The old Maryland Cole Fieldhouse would probably be the fourth best arena in the Big Ten if they still used it.
Three arenas from the 60's were not worth spending a dime on and should have been replaced by state of the art arenas with many premium suites, in Mackey, Crisler and the Illinois Assembly Hall. At least the "State Farm Center" at Il. is larger and somewhat more interesting than the other two.
The Indiana Assembly Hall is a abomination and should be torn down for a carbon copy of the Indiana Pacers basketball only facility. IU has the money to do it and that facility has nothing going for it other than its connection to Bobby Knight, and we know how that ended up. I do like Bob Knight, though.
Rutgers is smaller non-descript, but not a bad place, and Welsh Ryan at NW..smaller and... well......
That leaves Williams Arena. I used to think Williams was one of the greatest places ever based upon the impressions created on TV when the team was good and the building was loud, or when I attended in person and sat in the lower level sideline seats during the Clem Haskins era The other side of the coin is being in Williams when the team is bad, when 5000 lethargic fans are watching a Monson or Pitino team lose to South Dakota State. It is extremely uncomfortable to sit in that a which can be overlooked when the team is good. A good number of the seats have terrible sightlines under the overhangs.
I think that my point is that CHA and Williams Arena both have serious issues (very different issues), but I would not trade either one for anything else in the Big Ten other than the top two. (edit three, Nebraska, Maryland, MSU)
Be thankful a huge pile of money was not spend in the last 20 years on a now obsolete facility, or some turd like Crisler or Mackey was polished leasing to a mediocre result.
Missouri, Oregon, Pitt, Nebraska, USC and a few others have done it right recently though.
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Not sure what your talking about, was at the Iowa/Wisconsin game that coach Fran had his meltdown and I can tell you right now that the Kohl Center is one of my favorite places to watch a Big Ten basketball game, full house, loud, and the students and adults come out in groves...would love some day for Iowa to even have close to what Wisconsin has in an arena....
All suites in basketball arenas are pretty far away from the court. Most of them are for corporate/entertainment purposes and closeness to the floor isn't generally the main attraction. It's the atmosphere, the privacy/status and the free food and beverages.
I was a bit surprised they didn't do this in the last renovation, instead opting for deluxe seating in the lower rows and access to some kind of premium lounge away from the court. I'd have thought that any architect who said "there's no way to add suites in Carver" would have been told "sorry that's the wrong answer". Especially the way attendance fell off in the Lick years.
Love the idea of forcing all students to subsidize the few students who want to attend sporting events....all in order to convince students who don't really want to attend to go.
I went to 90% of basketball games in my tenure at UI, every game of the undefeated at hone season, I went to every football game, 85% of wrestling and sporadically to others.
I want the students there, but I can't imagine forcing students who don't want to go to subsidize it.
Students are lazy and believe they are always busy, so they don't always attend. They rarely attend during school breaks, like right now, that is who they are. If we can become like MSU/Duke/Kansas/etc maybe that will change, but we need to be realistic.
I'm all for free tickets only reserved the day before/of, but I don't think cost is the barrier. They spend the same amount (($5) to get in to the bar that same night they choose not to go.
What is really lacking is a a solid, outreaching student group, and none of us can fix that.
So even farther away? Why, to make parking easier?
Edit to add: I guess I'm just one that believes a college campus should stay a college campus, and Carver fits even though a segment of students always complain that it is too far. Those same students come up with different excuses to always not attend anyways, but their whining has merit, pushing it farther away takes away from what it is, a collegiate athletic venue.
Unfortunately, for some people "convenience" has simply become whatever their lazy asses demand, lots of parking, no lines for anything, perfect cell signal, free stuff, etc. All things that were completely absent during whatever "glory days" they point to, like the field house, the most inconvenient possible.
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To the Minnesota fan, I don't think anyone should judge State Farm Center (formerly Assembly Hall) until they visit it this year, post-renovation. They did a nice job with the place.
Here's a great article discussing renovations at Carver. http://www.thegazette.com/subject/s...nner-display-in-carver-hawkeye-arena-20150413
Thanks for sharing. Love the ideas presented in this article. The most important question, however, is if any renovations are being discussed?
I liked a few of the ideas from that article when it came out. The lower portion of the students is already bleachers, why not (in a complete remodel scenario) make the entire "student section" bleachers and standing room only? Allow it to go from E-K as it basically is now, but go, say, 20 rows up instead of 42. Am I right in remembering that it is bleachers from the floor to the first yellow railing (picture 3)? That looks to be ~10 rows, so double that and pack in the students. Then leave, maybe, a buffer of a few rows of regular seats and sell the rest to the public. Lets the students scrunch down as much as they wish and keeps them from spreading out. I remember a lot of spreading out in the mid aughts. This could also allow for the students to be "closer", which a lot of people seem to be demanding on here. I'd even be on board with duplicating that on the other side, bleachers-only seating for the general public at a discounted rate. A lot of people talk about how it looks on TV, and those would be what you see on tv. Is there a market for basically standing-room-only seats for non-students?
Now, it looks like according to the first picture below that the opposite of the student section contains handicap seating, so there would have to be a work-around for that, but looking at picture three that could just be putting the bleachers behind the handicap seats.
At this point, I'm not worried about number of seats, because the NCAA has basically put the kibosh on Carver hosting events .... they can't even host NCAA wrestling anymore which is aggravating. Without a way to add thousands of seats, they might as well ignore losing seating, there isn't going to be a big difference between 13,000 and 15,400 in my opinion.
A lot of the other stuff seems common-sensical, but I'm no engineer. Combining the side seating sections, such as c +b, a+aa, bb+cc, would allows for half the walkways without making the middle's too extreme. The same doesn't look like it would work in the corners where the tapering becomes obvious. The Pitt looks like it did this. Kinnick has what, 50 seats between exits? Surely much larger than Carver.
Also, I'm strongly in favor of adding suites, even if it meant taking out the top 10 rows along the side, sure it would be lost capacity, but that capacity doesn't mean much anymore, as I said before. Wrestling can't ever break the record again (nor likely will anyone else) and women's bball set the record far beyond what the fire marshall will ever let happen again, so it is all about fan interest, sound, and comfort. If we are honest, those who are interested in the suites are the fans who kept the program afloat for that dark period.
I don't know the feasibility of doing something like Illinois did, but I think a way to strike a balance with some of the problems would be to construct club/luxury seating by removing a certain number of rows within CHA. The generally older premium seating crowd can find it difficult to climb up and down a mountain of stairs, and wouldn't have to do so with luxury boxes. They wouldn't have to wait for the players to walk into the locker room at halftime before they are able to walk into the tunnel themselves. Currently that's absurd and looks awful. And in doing so, younger fans and students could be moved closer for a more active atmosphere. It's also easier to sellout with less overall seats. Carver would still have a large capacity for a college arena.
State Farm Arena has their new boxes essentially at the middle of the arena. It looks solid there, not sure what would look best or fit best at Carver were they to implement this (costly) idea.
State Farm Arena has their new boxes essentially at the middle of the arena. It looks solid there, not sure what would look best or fit best at Carver were they to implement this (costly) idea.
At Illinois the tunnels enter part way up and it looks like the boxes are at that level. Since we would need to get wheelchairs to boxes at carver they need to be at the top or bottom
