Inside the team that transforms State Farm Arena overnight, from games to concerts
In the span of a single week this fall, State Farm Arena hosted seven back-to-back events, ranging from basketball games to concerts to a church prayer event.
That’s par for the course at the downtown Atlanta arena that’s now one of the busiest venues in the country.
How does a single site go from basketball court to concert stage with floor seating in a matter of hours?
To understand the hectic nature of working inside an arena, look no further than the conversion crew tasked with transforming the venue’s layouts between events.
At State Farm Arena, this team includes up to 50 temporary and staff workers, waiting in the wings as an event wraps so that they can start to prepare for the next one.
During the week of Oct. 12, as the NBA preseason kicked off for the Hawks, the arena had NBA YoungBoy and Fantasia concerts, basketball games and a sold-out “powerful gathering of prayer” held by 2819 Church.
Throughout the week — and mostly overnight — the conversion team assembles and reassembles the basketball court, constructs and deconstructs stages, arranges and rearranges floor seating based on each event’s needs.
If everything goes according to plan, fans file into the arena for a night of entertainment without ever thinking about what the venue looked like mere hours before.
“I like to call it controlled chaos,” said Rodney Richardson, director of arena operation.
The seven-day run in mid-October is not an abnormal event schedule for State Farm Arena. Earlier this year, Billboard and Pollstar ranked the local arena No. 3 in ticket sales among similarly sized venues, behind Madison Square Garden in New York and Sphere in Las Vegas. According to the midyear report from the trade publications, State Farm hosted 598,000 fans across 60 events between October 2024 and March 2025.
Geoffrey Stiles, senior vice president of facilities and events for the Atlanta Hawks, says this achievement isn’t just a result of the team that books events for the venue. It’s also a testament to the conversion team for giving them the confidence that they can maintain a stacked calendar.
“There are a lot of venues who will not sell shows like we do because their teams are not as efficient at getting things changed over,” he said.
Richard “Que” Campbell, conversion coordinator, began working at the venue in 2018, when it was still called Philips Arena.
He’d recently graduated from Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida, with a degree in audio engineering. Joining the conversion team was only meant to be a temporary job. But Campbell said he loved the work and was intrigued by the ways he could make the arena’s processes more efficient.
When he first started, converting the concert stage into a basketball court or vice versa took up to 12 hours. The crew would work overnight, often beginning once a concert ended around 11 p.m. and working until the entire stage was removed. If the Hawks had a game the next day, the work had to be completed by 9 a.m. so the visiting team could practice. Even if there wasn’t a game the next day, the conversion crew often had to return to work the following day by 1 p.m. to set out chairs for the next event.
“My goal every year just kept being to cut down the time. We’ve gotten all the way down to where we can do a basketball conversion in about four to six hours at max,” Campbell said. “I feel like that’s magic, because it’s saving so much time. It’s saving so much money and a lot of stress.”
The shorter conversion times also mean crew members can go home and hopefully get a few more hours of sleep before returning to work the following afternoon.
On a Thursday in early October, Campbell and his crew arrived at work around 10 a.m. to set up the venue’s house stage for a Maxwell concert later in the day. He’d worked alongside Richardson and Kyle Conway, senior manager of conversion, beforehand to compile a master list of tasks and a map for the team to complete.
On this day, they were responsible for building a 60-foot-by-40 foot stage for the soul singer. From raising the understructures to building the stage decks on top, the stage was completed in about an hour. Later in the day, the crew returned to set up floor seating for the event.
But concerts also necessitate setting up other spaces inside the 750,000 square-foot arena, including dressing rooms and sometimes, suites and meet-and-greet rooms. Their conversion work for the day also included setting up the Hawks’ practice stage.
Once Maxwell finished performing Thursday night, Campbell and his team deconstructed the stage in time for folk band The Lumineers to load in their custom tour stage in the middle of the night for their Friday concert. (The house stage can only be built into rectangles, meaning large touring acts — including Dua Lipa who recently performed at the arena atop an infinity symbol-shaped stage — often travel with their own crew and materials.)
Conway, who began working at the arena in Campbell’s position roughly eight years ago, now oversees strategy and administrative tasks for the team alongside Richardson. While the team was assembling and deconstructing the space over and over again the week of Oct. 12, Conway was nearby, working from a portable desk just in case he needed to assist the team. Most of the time, he’s already looking ahead to plan for the coming weeks while a conversion is underway.
There are times when conversions don’t go as planned. If a basketball court is shipped out and comes back incomplete, that causes a delay in rebuilding it. Once, a performer extended the show beyond its scheduled time and delayed conversion.
“We had a basketball game the next day. My conversion team [is] standing behind me saying, ‘If we don’t do this, we are not going to have shootaround tomorrow for the NBA,” Stiles recalls. “Remember, I work for the Hawks. (State Farm Arena) exists to serve the Hawks. Our owners’ goal is to win a championship and … not being able to have a shootaround is very, very bad.”
“I’m having to make threats,” he adds. “I’m having to say, ‘I’m going to pull the power.’”
The nature of event planning often means coordinating with limited information, too. Stiles said when a concert is announced — especially if it’s a one-off show as opposed to a tour — the arena has to plan ahead so tickets can go on sale, but staging plans may not be finalized at that point.
Still, Stiles said the team largely manages to stay on track. “If a stage or barricade or the corner of a basketball floor is not set the right way, you’re talking about hours of redoing things, and that does not fall within that margin of error that we have, so we just can’t miss,” he said.
Conway, who started doing this work while studying chemical engineering at the University of Florida, is in his 19th basketball season as a member of a conversion team. “My career path really changed pretty tremendously because of this part-time job that I picked up kind of on a whim,” he said.
Throughout his career, he said he’s heard people describe the unseen work of conversion crews as “magic.”
“We used to joke in college … You know that old fairytale about the gnomes that would fix your shoes overnight? We’re the gnomes,” he says. “People leave and they come back and the whole place is different.”
About the Author
Jewel Wicker is a native Atlantan who has covered hip-hop in the city for publications such as GQ, Pitchfork and Vice.
