Admission will be free to the music festival and the Divisions II and III games. Other fan events will include the Final Four Fan Fest April 3-6 in the Georgia World Congress Center, the March Madness Music Festival in Centennial Olympic Park April 3-5 and the NCAA Divisions II and III championship games in State Farm Arena on April 5. The practices will be followed by the Reese’s All-Star Game, an event featuring some of college basketball’s top senior players. “It’ll be a herculean effort,” Adkins said.įans will be able to get a first look at the result April 3, when the Final Four teams will hold free open practices in the stadium. The Mercedes-Benz Stadium transformation will occur over the final two weeks of March, when crews will be at work in the building around the clock. The temporary scoreboard will be the same one that was used at last year’s Final Four in Minneapolis, Gavitt said. It gives coaches and student-athletes a chance to know exactly where to find the score, time and the like. It brings the scale down a little bit by having something over your head. We’re trying to make it as (similar) to what they are used to as possible. Said Gavitt: “It’s a tremendously different experience playing in a stadium versus playing in arenas the entire rest of the season. “Why deviate at that point in the season? It made no sense to do that, at least from the committee’s standpoint.” “From an experience standpoint, it’s kind of tradition-based,” committee chairman Kevin White, the athletic director at Duke, said of the center-hung scoreboard. “Our strong sense is that the venue would have preferred not to have a center-hung and just showcase what is a spectacular asset in the halo board,” Gavitt said.īut the NCAA Men’s Basketball Committee and staff decided it would be better to hang a scoreboard in a position where players and coaches are accustomed to seeing one. The NCAA typically installs a temporary scoreboard above the court for Final Fours in NFL stadiums, but the organization gave “serious consideration” to not doing so this year, Gavitt said, because of the halo-shaped video board built into the roof structure. The stadium is expected to have a Final Four capacity of more than 80,000, which would put the event in position to break its all-time attendance record. But the “geometry” of Mercedes-Benz Stadium will require a larger “build-out” than previous Final Fours, Carl Adkins, executive director of the Atlanta host committee, said. The NCAA uses variations of the portable seating system at the Final Four each year.
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