If he has enough people power in place, Mark Stuckey swears he can get the “new” basketball court constructed inside Wesbanco Arena.
Now, if Stuckey is guiding 12 employees, then maybe the process would be even quicker, but if there’s only six?
“All we use are human hands and a forklift,” the operations manager explained. “There are a total of 15 rows of sections of the court, and they are all numbered. Putting it all together isn’t a difficult thing to do, but it can take twice as long if you don’t have the people.
“Once we start laying them out, it goes very quickly. Boom, boom, boom, row after row,” Stuckey said. “If we have enough teams of people, we can pretty much do the whole thing at once after we get the pieces out of the storage room. When the ice is down, we place the fiberglass flooring down and that takes about a half hour, and then the court goes down. But again, that’s only when the ice is down.”
The ice was removed soon after the Nailers’ regular season was completed in early April, and this past weekend the main floor was set up for the Whiskey Myers concert that was attended by a little more than 3,000 fans. Now, Stuckey and his crew soon will need to build the decade-old court for the regional tourney in The Basketball Tournament.
Overall, there is a 64-team field for the annual TBT with seven regional events and the finals scheduled for Philadelphia on August 2-3. In Wheeling, tickets are being sold for eight games, including the TBT quarterfinals between the winners of the West Virginia and Syracuse regionals.
“When we have to put down the basketball court, it’s the biggest job we have as a crew,” Stuckey said. “And it doesn’t matter whether the new ice is down or not. It’s just like putting together a puzzle. Now, when we put the court down for The Basketball Tournament, it’ll be the first time we do that with the arena’s new concrete.
“This new concrete has a texture to it and the old concrete didn’t. That means it’s going to be more difficult when it comes to sliding the pieces of the court,” he explained. “The next texture is there because when the old floor got wet, it was very, very slippery, so we’ll just have to make some changes with how we go about it.”
UPDATE: Basketballs and Meatballs
There are four games set for Wheeling on July 25th, two games for the 27th, one on the 29th, and a quarterfinal matchup is scheduled for July 30th at 4 p.m. Oh, and the Undo’s Italian Festival is scheduled along Water Street the very same weekend.
Oh, by the way.
“There’s a great conversation that taking place between the festival folks and the people at the TBT to make sure everything works the right way,” said Kelly Tucker, the executive director of Wesbanco Arena and the Capitol Theatre. “The dates were determined by ESPN so everyone is being very careful while planning so it all makes sense when the events are taking place.
“It’s going to be a lot of people coming to downtown Wheeling, and that’s a good thing,” she said. “We have a great team at the arena and the festival has a great team, too, so it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
Former college standouts are on the rosters for the TBT teams, and the winner-takes-all-prize is $1 million. Each of the four quarters is nine minutes in length, it takes six personal fouls for players to foul out, and there is no overtime because the TBT adopted the Elam Ending for all games.
“The level of the basketball that will be played that weekend will be very high and from what I have seen from past years, we should expect a lot of new people coming to Wheeling,” the arena GM said. “The Best Virginia team is going to be the highlight for the locals, but the other teams will have their fans, too. We’ve been advised to expect as many as 5,000 fans for each of the eight games.”
