As a project manager for Client Service Group, Ron Kish is responsible for live-event support, including several of the sports and event venues in SNA Displays’ portfolio. Ron has nearly 30 years of experience in the live-events industry, having previously been the operations manager at Continental Airlines Arena and the vice president of arena production at Madison Square Garden.
If you watched the 2024 NBA All-Star Game and peripheral events a few weeks ago, the Big Ten Football Championship, or any Indianapolis Colts home game since 2022, you likely saw more than a few of the 50 LED video screens SNA Displays installed during a major technology overhaul at Lucas Oil Stadium. As part of its agreement with the Capital Improvement Board of Managers of Marion County, the entity charged with financing and management of Lucas Oil Stadium, SNA Displays provided in-person event support at the stadium. So, we’ve had the privilege of supporting these and other major events at the stadium, one of the most active high-profile event venues in the U.S.
In addition to ensuring that our screens captured all of the excitement and action of the centerpiece All-Star Game, we supported the Ruffles NBA All-Star Celebrity Game, AT&T Slam Dunk competition, Starry 3-Point Contest, and Kia Skills Challenge leading up to the main attraction.
As a project manager for Client Service Group (CSG), our managed services business unit, my job is Day 2 Support, so I’ve been on hand for every Indianapolis Colts game of the last two years. In a nutshell, we provide proactive monitoring as preventative maintenance (making sure we detect problems before they occur) as well as on-site or remote support during events.
That means CSG checks in 72 hours before the event to begin testing everything to make sure there aren’t any foreseeable issues and dispatch a service technician as needed. There’s an entire ecosystem involved in sporting events that goes way beyond the video boards themselves. With our expertise in events production, we can fill in knowledge gaps the main event staff may have. We already know what to expect and how to minimize failure. Plus, we have backups and backups to the backups just in case.
However, since no system is perfect, we’re also on hand for unforeseeable problems. We know what typically goes wrong and have a plan to deal with it so no-one feels that cold grip of panic when electronics go down with millions of eyeballs on it. If it can be fixed, CSG will fix it.
Special events like the 2024 NBA All-Star Game and all the ancillary events surrounding the week took those active monitoring responsibilities to a whole new level. For one thing, the NBA brought in its own graphics group, rental boards, and scoring systems. This required some creative problem solving because we had to integrate the temporary systems into the existing network so that we could control both the new boards and the stadium’s fixed display assets from the same control room.
Another element to hosting this event was coordinating with the NBA’s graphics team to ensure their content was formatted according to the correct parameters (e.g., each pixel was mapped to the correct spot on the screen) and then brought back over to our control team to integrate that content throughout the whole system. Finally, we had to ensure all of the NBA’s timing and scoring equipment, which is inherently different from the NFL’s setup, was foolproof because the game stops if those pieces aren’t working.
Essentially, we had to ensure our content management system worked seamlessly with all of the additional outputs. I’m proud to say that everything went off without a hitch.
Lucas Oil Stadium will host the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Swimming in June. This involves installing three temporary pools over the field and interactive fan events such as the Toyota Aqua Zone at the connected Indiana Convention Center (which also has a digital signage network from SNA Displays).
It’s a little mind boggling that LOS can transform from football stadium to basketball court to swimming pool. But don’t worry, give us everything you can think of doing and we’ll give you solutions for how to do it.