Basketball Arenas Research Articles

Beyond Technical Specs: Using AHP to Prioritize User Needs in Turkish Basketball Arena Designs

Basketball arenas are crucial spaces that must meet specific standards to ensure the sustainability of the sport and the quality of play. While Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) assesses these standards, it often assumes that all performance indicators are equally important, potentially leading to a gap between design intent and actual user experience. This study aims to bridge this gap by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to prioritize evaluation criteria for Turkish professional basketball arenas designed for national and international matches, regional/local competitions, and training programs. Existing studies and reports indicate that basketball arenas in Turkey often fall short in meeting necessary physical requirements and exhibit performance deficiencies. To address this gap, this study identifies factors determining arena performance, categorized as technical, functional, and behavioral based on Preiser's framework. These criteria were further categorized according to different spaces within the arena, including general use areas, administrative spaces, and athlete-specific areas. A panel of expert sports facility design professionals provided judgments about the relative importance of these criteria using pairwise comparisons. The AHP method was then employed to calculate priority weights for each criterion. The results reveal the relative importance of different criteria for each space. For example, in general use areas, "furniture suitability/sufficiency" and "provision of ergonomic conditions for the disabled" ranked highest. In administrative spaces, "fire protection" and "accessibility" were deemed most important, while in athlete-specific areas, "visual and auditory privacy" and "security" took precedence. This study demonstrates the potential of AHP for developing a systematic and reliable framework for qualitative evaluations that measure user satisfaction. AHP-based evaluation models offer a valuable tool for architects, facility managers, and decision-makers to assess architectural design quality, prioritize design criteria, and support user-centered design processes.

Bad Boy for Life: Hip-Hop Music, Race, and Sports

P Diddy’s Bad Boy for Life video provides a strategic point of departure in the quest for values and community, sui generis, in SportsWorld. This study poses an interruption to the “ideological” articulations of discourse on the relationship between hip-hop music and sports by providing an examination of empirical and scientific data inside of SportsWorld. There is a carefully crafted narrative about the coexistence among Black American athletes, SportsWorld, and hip-hop music. From the beginning of Black athletes’ entry into the White spaces of the so-called level playing field of sports—from National Association of Stock Car Racing to the National Hockey Association to Major League Baseball to National Basketball Association—this integration upsets the norms of both civility and history; because for many in White America, the belief persists that these same athletes were not then and should not be today in those sacred spaces. From Jackie Robinson to the Williams Sisters to Jack Johnson to Tiger Woods to Althea Gibson to Fritz Pollard and, of course, Muhammad Ali—all of these pioneers suffered the indignities of racial discrimination. As Smith argues in his 2014 book Race, Sport and the American Dream, fast forward, deep inside the second aught of the 21st century, it is often assumed that the addition of hip-hop music to the pregame and half-time entertainment at ballparks, basketball arenas, stadiums, and ice hockey arenas signals a welcoming to the Black Athlete and their fans. Using a Marxian lens, this study argues that both these assumptions are no more than the ideology of beliefs that Marx describes as “fantasies and illusions” or more straightforward a “phantasmagoria.” These fantasies and illusions show up as a laterna magica projecting images on society and in SportsWorld, where these can be described as commodity fetishism. Through the authors' empirical analysis of data on segregation and integration in SportsWorld, they demonstrate that things are not always as they seem.

Trends in Stadium and Arena Construction, 1995-2016

A total of 50 stadiums and arenas opened between 1995 and 2005 including: 12 new baseball stadiums, five basketball arenas, ten hockey arenas, eight dual use NBA/NHL venues and 16 football fields. And it’s far from over: the New York Yankees, Minnesota Twins, Washington Nationals, New York Mets and St. Louis Cardinals of Major League Baseball and the Arizona Cardinals, Indianapolis Colts, Minnesota Vikings, New York Giants, New York Jets and Dallas Cowboys of the NFL will all receive new stadiums between 2006 and 2010. This paper summarizes recent and emerging trends associated with the capacity, cost, public subsidy and accompanying legislative characteristics of stadium and arena construction.

Review court ruling on captioning at university football stadiums, basketball arenas and on athletics websites

A Maryland federal court held that it wouldn't be a fundamental alteration for a university to provide captioning at football stadiums and basketball arenas, and on athletics websites, but that factual issues existed as to whether providing captioning would be an undue burden on the university. Innes v. The Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland, Civil Action No. DKC 13‐2800, will now go to trial.

Review court ruling on captioning at university football stadiums, basketball arenas and on athletics websites

A Maryland federal court held that it wouldn't be a fundamental alteration for a university to provide captioning at football stadiums and basketball arenas and on athletics websites, but that factual issues existed as to whether providing captioning would be an undue burden on the university. Innes v. The Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland, Civil Action No. DKC 13‐2800, will now go to trial.

Review court ruling on captioning at university football stadium, basketball arena and on athletics websites

A Maryland federal court held that it would not be a fundamental alteration for a university to provide captioning at football stadiums and basketball arenas, and on athletic websites, but that factual issues existed as to whether providing captioning would be an undue burden on the university. Innes v. The Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland, Civil Action No. DKC 13‐2800, will now go to trial.

Are Basketball Arenas Catalysts of Economic Development?

ABSTRACT:Academic researchers continue to challenge the popular perception that new or renovated stadiums are catalysts of economic development. Despite basketball arenas generally having lower construction costs and being more multipurpose, past studies have disproportionately examined professional baseball and football stadiums. Using the most recent data, this study investigates the economic impact of professional basketball arenas. After controlling for a range of covariates past research has identified as possible predictors, I find little evidence that basketball arenas are primary catalysts of development. I conclude that the context of the city, not the facility, is what drives the economic development capacity of basketball arenas.

Rating of the loudest college basketball arenas for Entertainment Sports Network (ESPN) magazine.

A recent ESPN magazine article [“These go to 11,” ESPN the Magazine 15 Nov (2010)] ranked the top collegiate basketball arenas according to “noise potential.” The top five arenas were listed as Kansas University, Duke University, New Mexico University, Kentucky University, and Florida University. The rankings were established by a team of Penn State Acoustics students using the theory for sound buildup in large rooms, since actual measurements were infeasible. Both diffuse field and direct field contributions of the sound pressure were estimated at center court for octave band frequencies from 125 Hz to 4 kHz. Seating geometries, materials, and other relevant information were collected for each arena and used with estimated absorption coefficients to determine the room constant and critical distance. The diffuse field contributions were then combined with approximate sources terms based on the seating capacity of the arena, the proximity of the fans to the court, and whether they were students. The sound pressures were then combined into a total A‐weighted sound pressure level and used to determine the ranking. The direct and reverberant contributions of each arena were then compared to establish the positive and negative aspects of each arena in terms of noise potential. This comparison reveals how Kansas and Duke reached the top of the ranking, despite having drastically different arena geometry and capacity.

Trends in Stadium and Arena Construction, 1995-2015

A total of 56 stadiums and arenas opened between 1995 and 2009 including: 17 new baseball stadiums, four basketball arenas, nine hockey arenas, seven dual use NBA/NHL venues and 19 football fields. And it’s far from over: the San Francisco 49ers, San Diego Chargers, New York Giants, New York Jets, Minnesota Vikings, Oakland Athletics, Florida Marlins, Tampa Bay Rays, Minnesota Twins, Sacramento Kings, Orlando Magic, New Jersey Nets, New York Islanders and Pittsburgh Penguins anticipate new arenas by 2015. This paper summarizes recent and emerging trends associated with the capacity, cost, public subsidy and accompanying legislative characteristics of stadium and arena construction.

The Economic Consequences of Professional Sports Strikes and Lockouts

The National Basketball Association (NBA) lockout of 1998‐1999 resulted in the cancellation of a significant number of games. According to the claims made by proponents of sports‐driven economic growth, cities with NBA franchises should experience significant negative economic losses from this work stoppage because of the lost spending in and around basketball arenas during this event. Although it will be several years before adequate data exist for a careful ex post evaluation of the effects of the lockout, an examination of the impact of past work stoppages in professional football and basketball can shed some light on the potential impact of the NBA lockout as well as the viability of professional sports as engines of economic growth in cities. The parameter estimates from a reduced‐form empirical model of the determination of real per capita income in 37 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) over the period 1969‐1996 suggest that prior work stoppages in professional football and baseball had no impact on the economies of cities with franchises. Further, the departure of professional basketball from cities had no impact on their economies in the following years. These results refute the idea that attracting professional sports franchises represents a viable economic development strategy.

Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States by Douglas Gomery

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 199 this kind of imagery, and such examples of pictorial (as opposed to photographic) journalism are needed to show the special contribution photography offered. Robert Taft’s Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839—1889, first published in 1938 (New York) and still available in a Dover reprint edition, remains the classic study of the subject. Despite its subtitle, Taft’s book contains more technical information, correctly rendered, than the present work. Carlebach does not understand the photomechanical processes, and he confuses their names and charac­ teristics from the introduction all the way through to the glossary. His final chapter, “Dryplates and Halftones,” which should be the culmi­ nation of his argument, is the weakest in the book. By contrast, Taft’s chapter “Photography and the Pictorial Press” gives a brief history of the most important illustrated papers, plus a detailed and accurate description of the development of the halftone. This book offers a number of important illustrations from great moments in American history, and the author has gone to much trouble to locate and pair images from photo and print media, but he has not answered the fundamental question implied in his title: Where do pictures fit in the larger story of newsmaking, and how did photography influence and change journalism? Helena E. Wright Ms. Wright is curator of graphic arts at the National Museum of American History. Her specialty is the history of American pictorial printing. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. By Douglas Gomery. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Pp. xxii +381; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). Shared Pleasures is an economic history of the exhibition end of the film industry in the United States. Douglas Gomery’s perspective emphasizes the impact of social, economic, and technological variables on industry revenue. The movie itself is relegated to a secondary level of importance. Movie exhibition is broadly defined, encompassing early nickelodeons, movie palaces, neighborhood theaters, multi­ plexes, late-show television, and home video. Because this is first and foremost a business history, the interaction of exhibition with techno­ logical and social change is analyzed in terms of rising and falling profits. Gomery has structured his book in three parts. The first describes the growth of movie theaters from an Edison kinetoscope parlor in a converted shoe store to today’s mall multiplex of twenty auditoriums. In the late years of the 19th century, both urban and rural audiences were introduced to the movies through traveling exhibitions and 200 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE short films shown at vaudeville houses. However, it was the nickelodeon era that transformed movie exhibition into a big business. The explosive growth of the nickelodeon resulted in a national marketing strategy based on the successful model of national chain and department stores. Powerful regional chains of theaters arose, the largest of these being Balaban and Katz ofChicago and Loew’s ofNew York City, whose lasting monuments were the glorious urban movie palaces of the 1920s. Ultimately these regional businesses coalesced into national chains dominated by the five major Hollywood production companies. Movie attendance was influenced by external events such as depres­ sion, war, suburbanization, and cold war ideology, and Gomery argues that these kinds of social and political factors were far more important in determining revenue than the draw of individual films. Exhibitors faced each challenge through innovation, often with technological incentives such as air conditioning and sound, or entrepreneurial ones, as with the introduction of popcorn and giveaways. Postwar baby-boom families spent their money on durable goods and housing rather than movies, and Gomery asserts that it was this trend toward a family- and child-centered suburban lifestyle that caused the postwar decline in moviegoing, rather than the more commonly perceived threat of television. Suburbanization resulted in the growth of drive-ins, mall cinemas, and the current rise of “postmodern Xanadus of pleasure,” multiplexes with concession stands the size of basketball arenas (p. 113). Part 2 of Shared Pleasures explores alternative types of specialized theaters such as the art cinema and theaters that cater to specific ethnic groups. The most compelling chapter in this...