The public got their first look at the Intuit Dome when the Los Angeles venue hosted a Bruno Mars concert on August 15. While this may have been the first time that the public interacted with the arena, those who manage the facility had been preparing for the moment for years.
The Intuit Dome, which will be the new home for the National Basketball Association’s Los Angeles Clippers, had been getting input from operations staff all the way back to the beginning of 2018, when its chief operating officer Alex Diaz was a consultant for the project.
“My focus was less on the look and feel,” Diaz said of his work prior to the arena’s opening. ”For me, it's more how the building actually will function, and what spaces we need and how big they need to be.”
Diaz added that the building has placed a heightened emphasis on the fan experience and on getting people back into their seats as quickly as possible during games or concerts. For example, in addition to the number of toilets in the arena, the Intuit Dome design and operations team considered how closely restrooms are located to seats and where the mirrors would be located, Diaz said.
While it's fairly standard for big arena projects to incorporate operations staff early in the design process, Diaz was uniquely empowered to voice his perspective on operational needs, according to Bill Hanway, executive vice president and global sports and social infrastructure leader at AECOM, which led the design for the Intuit Dome project.
Hanway said he met with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer almost ten years ago to discuss a possible arena, shortly after Ballmer acquired the team.
“One thing about Steve [Ballmer]’s management style is he lays out a vision, but he brings in the best people in the business to work with him to find solutions,” Hanway said. “Alex [Diaz]’s input was as important as anybody else's in the process.”
Hanway said that the project’s focus on loading docks is an example of how the design and operations teams collaborated. While the NBA requires six loading docks in arenas, Inuit Dome, which aims to divert 90% of materials away from landfills, waste-to-energy and incineration, added three more docks for waste disposal.
T-shirt cannons, more commonly associated with in-game operations, were also a part of the design process, as Ballmer wanted the t-shirts to reach the upper row of the building, according to Hanway. To do this, the design team placed cannons on top of the scoreboard.
“While we were testing them, we realized that the t-shirts are actually quite heavy when they're being fired down into the upper rows,” Hanway said. “We had to work it out just to make sure that they were not going to be injuring people.”
Brian McCullough, an associate professor of sport management at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology, said getting design and operations on the same page is important. He noted that he knew of one arena where a sponsor could not fit its truck through the arena’s garage.
“Getting people that are on the front lines of using the facility and saying, ‘This really creates a big problem.’ Having them involved in that design process and engineering is really, really critical, so that you don't have the design as the theoretical, and then [have] operations coming in as the application,” he said.
A vision becomes reality
As the Intuit Dome’s inaugural season drew near, Diaz began turning his operations vision into a reality. A little more than a year ago, he hired a vice president of operations and an assistant general manager.
Now that the arena is open, the concerts leading up to the arena’s first NBA regular season game on October 23 have presented some learning experiences, particularly around the waste disposal process, Diaz said.
“It is one of the most difficult parts of running a sustainable operation. Ensuring that you're getting the right stuff going out of the building in the right way,” Diaz said.
Intuit Dome, like others nationwide, is trying to make its waste disposal process as intuitive as possible for fans, offering mostly compostable single-use items, Diaz said. After the initial concerts, Diaz’ team learned how many people they would need to sort through the waste, which happens on site, to ensure it is disposed of properly, he added.
McCullough said that challenges like waste disposal are bound to arise when the arena opens to the public. Despite having expectations on how operations will work, “human behavior is way different, especially when you’re drinking and might be doing other things when you’re going into a concert or sporting event. That makes it challenging,” McCullough said.
Hanway said the arena’s long escalators have also caused growing pains, as they needed to be shut down during peak periods of the Bruno Mars concert. Such issues were “not unexpected,” however, in part because escalators need to be broken in initially, he added.
There have also been pleasant surprises, such as how quickly fans have been able to exit the arena, Diaz said.
In reflecting on the operations team’s role in the arena’s development, Diaz said that when building an arena, it's important to think outside the box to create a unique experience in the facility.
“I think a lot of buildings will do what the last building did and what the building before that did,” he said. “We really challenged ourselves trying to pick the things that made sense for us.”
