The Carrier Dome will play host to a basketball and lacrosse game on the same day for the first time in its 25-year history on Saturday.

The Syracuse men’s basketball team hosts Providence at noon in its final home game of the season and at 7:30 p.m., the SU men’s lacrosse team welcomes Army to the Dome for its season opener.

The Carrier Dome has held multiple events in the same day, but it has never had to be converted from a basketball setup to a lacrosse setup in the same day. Usually such events are held on back-to-back days giving the Dome staff more time to complete the switch, but Army couldn’t make it for a Sunday game.

‘It’s going to take a lot of work,’ said Carrier Dome Managing Director Pat Campbell. ‘It’s time consuming.’

Assistant Director of Facilities Operations for the Carrier Dome Peter Sala said the conversion should take three-to-four hours. With the basketball game slated for a noon start, the building should be relatively clear of fans by 2:30 p.m.

Sala and his crew of close to 200 will then have four hours before the gates open at 6:30 to clean the stands, remove the basketball court, move the temporary bleachers and lay down the Astroturf. The crew also has to convert the locker rooms from a basketball setup, where only part of it is utilized, to a full setup.

The only change Sala and Campbell are making before Saturday is to lay down approximately 50 yards of turf on the non-basketball side of the Dome so it doesn’t have to be done after the game.

Sala said the hardest part of the changeover is cleaning the building. He said the entire lower tier of seats will be 100 percent clean and estimates the top tier will be close to 90 percent. A few extra staff members will be added to the custodial team.

‘I want it to be spotless,’ Sala said.

Campbell said that everything should go smoothly as long as no machinery breaks down, such as the components used to take down the telescopic platform at the top of the temporary bleachers used for TV. Campbell and Sala are both confident everything will be set up in time and fans won’t even recognize that Syracuse played a basketball game earlier in the day.

‘We had to have a regular season home game,’ Campbell said. ‘I’d prefer to play on Sunday. But it wasn’t going to work on Sunday. It was important to play on Saturday evening.’

Published on February 20, 2005 at 12:00 pm