The California Baptist University Events Center experience depends on a large number of people who work behind the scenes to take student experience of chapel, games and events on another level.
“Because there are a great many options competing for the attention of students and others who attend, programming is intended to be relevant, fast-paced and high energy in a way that makes the Events Center a fun destination, whether you are deeply interested in the offered event or just spending time with friends,” said Jim Walters, Events Center administrator.
For even a single event, setup, the event and teardown may take anywhere from 8 to 12 hours under of assembly and preparation and the efforts of about 20 to 40 people.
“There is round-the-clock cleaning that goes on in the Events Center virtually every day,” Walters said. “These are general cleaning tasks like vacuuming, dusting and sweeping. On top of all of that, the game floor has to be cleaned constantly. It is swept multiple times a day and mopped several times per week.”
Cleaning is merely one of the many things that must be considered in preparing the Events Center for student activities. The conditions of the Events Center play a large part in the atmosphere of the Events Center.
“Office workers within the facility, folks attending the game, students at Chapel, and athletes practicing or playing in a contest all have different expectations for temperature in the facility. We have to find one that will be generally acceptable and then try to fine tune very specific areas of the building,” Walters said.
Ethan Angle, sophomore computer science major and production student worker, said, “We do everything from the video to the audio and livestream stuff for the events on campus. Lighting and everything takes a lot of work. It takes us a couple hours to get the stage set up for Chapel every day. The Events Center is very easy to set up for sports because everything is just built into it.”
With this 453,000 square – foot building, safety precautions must be established to ensure that any issue might be resolved in a moment’s notice, allowing the Events Center to run with little to no issues during an event.
“We use full-time employees, entry-level employees, graduate assistancts, interns and student workers. We have a bunch of people on headsets and then we have a bunch of people on walkie-talkies so that if there’s anything that has happened you can get on it right away and say, ‘Hey, I got this issue that I’m dealing with,’ and then the people would listen and say, ’That’s me. I need to go help,’” said Dr. Mciah Parker, director of Athletics..
Even as the Events Center requires a complexity of layers to function, it will continue to be a place of friends, food and good times for students for years to come.
“The best event is when everything goes well and you don’t see all the things that happened or we prevented from happening. The students just get to come and have a fun time,” Parker said.
It takes a great amount of time to make the Events Center run but by the time of the event, it will always be ready for any event taking place.
