Electric Fishwrap

By Kate Martin

Reporter-Herald Staff Writer

It’s 9 p.m., and the Colorado Chill’s basketball game has just ended at the Budweiser Events Center.Eager fans gather around the players to chat and get autographs.

Meanwhile, 15 young men are the image of industry: unsnapping court-level chairs from each other, folding them up and stacking them on carts.

They are college students. They are husbands and brothers. For some, this is their second job: they are the Budweiser Events Center changeover crew.

They are the manpower behind the transformation from a concert venue to an ice arena, from an ice arena to a basketball court, and, this night, from a basketball court back to a hockey arena.

Soon, a foghorn sounds, signaling the end of the autograph session, and the changeover crew moves in.

Members of the Colorado Chill Band clear out their electronic equipment and instruments as changeover staff members jog past.

Terry Stanfill, a saxophone player for the Chill Band, says the floor felt cold his first couple of nights in the Events Center.

“It seems to be fine now,” Stanfill says, stomping on the dark green flooring. “Right under this, there is ice.”

The insulated “polar” flooring sits directly on top of the ice, and the basketball floor rests on top of the polar flooring.

It is 9:30 p.m., and the change-over begins in earnest.

Flatbed trolleys, 8 feet by 4 feet wide, are wheeled onto the floor. As the last of the fans exit, the basketball floor slowly comes apart, piece by piece.

The men look like members of an army, dressed nearly identically in light T-shirts, jeans and sturdy shoes. Some have work gloves hanging out of their back pockets, or stuffed in the waistbands of their pants.

The basketball floor seems like any other: regulation size, made of long wooden slats. But upon closer inspection, it is a puzzle. It’s built of 8-by-4-foot sections, each marked on the side with a row number and letter.

The sections have a hook on one side and a groove on the other. As a result, the floor must be dismantled from the west side of the arena first.

It’s a strange ballet. Working in unison, the changeover crew dismantles the basketball floor and stacks the wooden slabs on the carts. They alternate stacking them face up and face down; grooves on the bottom of the playing surface fit together and conserve space. When two play surfaces touch, a sheet of protective plastic is placed between them to prevent scratching.

Now the workers’ gloves’ purpose is evident. The 100-pound slabs of basketball court often smack together, pinching fingers of any not-so-quick crew members.

This is a second job for Fort Collins resident Bryan Springer. Springer, 24, has been dismantling and assembling for the changeover crew for four months.

“This is pretty simplistic, a labor job,” he said as he lifted one side of a slab of basketball court. “It fits nice with a part-time schedule.”

Springer, tall and lanky, is typical of a member of the crew: young, fit and willing to work when others are asleep.

“Putting it together for the first time, with a bunch of people who had never done it before, was all trial and error,” said J.R. Westveer, operations and changeover manager for the Events Center.

Now, he says, the crew can tear down the basketball floor and expose the hockey ice in about three hours. Putting it back together is another matter, however.

“Putting it up will always take longer than tearing it down,” Westveer said. “The floor has to go in perfectly straight the first time. It goes pretty slow at first, but we usually catch it pretty fast if it’s out of line.”

It takes five hours to change from hockey to basketball. But the crew gets quicker and quicker with each changeover, Westveer said.

As the floor comes apart, a crew of five comes in and starts installing metal support rods around the dasher boards to hold Plexiglas panels for the hockey setup. Meanwhile, two forklifts alternate removing and storing the carts full of basketball flooring and loads of chairs. The flooring is stored underneath the east bleachers. In all, 15 carts of flooring, each stacked 15 high, will be stored there.

Another group of men assembles the penalty boxes while one member of the Plexiglas crew holds up a sheet of the clear material while another slides metal rods in place to secure the sheet.

It is 10:30 p.m., and nearly half of the basketball flooring is put away under the bleachers. One-quarter of the Plexiglas is already installed along the east side of the arena.

Troy Smith is the chief Zamboni driver for the Events Center. He helps install the glass before the hockey games.

“The small slabs of glass are 75 to 80 pounds,” he said. “Thankfully, it’s not real glass.”

Real glass, he said, would take three times as much manpower to install because it would be heavier.

The basketball backboards collapse and are removed from the wooden floor with forklifts. They, too, are stored beneath the east bleachers.

Westveer hired this group of men over the past few months from job fairs and word-of-mouth from current employees. There is a high turnover rate for this line of work, he said. Odd hours, sometimes until 5 a.m., along with his strict policies keep the crew full of new faces. Tonight’s crew has two new guys, both in their second night of work.

It is 11:30 p.m., and the last piece of basketball flooring is loaded onto the pile. All that remains for removal is the polar flooring. Some of the crew members grab sweaters or long-sleeved T-shirts. One man grabs a pry bar and shoves it underneath the dark green polar flooring, wedging it from the ice.

The polar flooring is in 8-by-4-foot sections. About an inch thick, it is composed of a fiberglass-like material, Westveer said. It helps keep the ice cold and the arena warm, but it doesn’t keep everything off the ice.

“Stuff will get through, especially liquid,” Westveer said. “Especially after a concert. People drink a lot of beer.”

As the polar floor comes off, large yellow stains appear on some areas of the ice where beer spilled through the cracks, but the Zamboni will scrape that layer off, Westveer said, exposing clean ice beneath.

Usually, the changeover workers can remove the polar flooring in less than an hour. Tonight, they do.

The crew moves across the ice with efficiency. It is a contest, one employee explained; the first one to fall loses.

Some of the crew members seem to defy gravity as they skate across the ice on the slabs of flooring.

Tall stacks of the polar floor are carted away, whitened by frost, into the east side under the bleachers. Covered with dust, beer and wood chips, the covering will be cleaned before the next basketball game, Westveer said.

Forklift driver Tom Baldwin, 53, said he enjoys working the changeover shift. He also is the owner of Knowlton Urethane, a foam insulation company.

“It’s fun. I get to play on the ice. It’s kind of a break,” Baldwin said. “I don’t have the stress of a bad economy in construction when I work here.”

At 12:30 a.m., the crew is finishing up stacking flooring onto pallets — north and south edge pieces are reserved in a special order — and the Plexiglas installation is nearly complete.

The safety nets on both sides of the arena unfurl and clip to washers at the top of the Plexiglas. The Zamboni zips around the arena, shaving off the dirty ice and exposing clean.

But some of the ice doesn’t look entirely solid or clean. Dark patches plague the hockey arena in places. Westveer said this is the result of a problem during construction.

“When they painted the concrete of the hockey surface, some of the paint didn’t bind with the concrete,” he said. “We’ll fix that when we melt it down in the spring.”

The crew is finished for the night by 1 a.m., only to return the next night to transform the Events Center back to basketball.

It takes a certain breed of person to work night after night like this, Westveer said.

“I’m happy to have the college kids. They’ve got a lot of muscle,” he said. “But some people, like Tom (Baldwin), are just workers.”

Originally published Feb. 8, 2004.