About 2,000 volunteers have been lined up. About 100 18-wheeler trucks have been unloaded at the Georgia Dome. And four teams are on their way.
Finally, it’s Final Four week in Atlanta.
“It’s a culmination of over a year and a half of planning, coordination and, I think, excellent leadership from all circles within the city to bring about what I believe will be the greatest sporting event for Atlanta next to the Olympics,” said John Yates, an attorney who is chairman of Atlanta’s host committee.
Hosting the Final Four, one of the bigger events in American sports, requires multifaceted preparation. The NCAA and Georgia Dome staffs will manage the event inside the venue, with support from host-school Georgia Tech. But the Final Four extends outside the venue — to concerts, a fan fest and the like — and the resulting four-day spectacle requires an army of volunteers working in conjunction with paid staffers, contracted companies and corporate sponsors.
“I think most people are surprised that the majority of people who work on the event are volunteers,” said Sharon Goldmacher, executive director of the local organizing committee.
Volunteers’ duties will run the gamut from greeting arriving fans at the airport to helping with shuttle buses to assisting at an array of ancillary activities.
Orchestrating the local effort is the 50-person committee led by Yates, a partner in Atlanta-based law firm Morris, Manning & Martin, and Goldmacher, president of the public-relations firm Communications 21. Committee members were assigned areas of responsibility based on their expertise, such as community outreach, government relations, transportation, decor, marketing, lodging, etc.
Yates, a Duke graduate and an avid hoops fan, said he has been struck by “the level of enthusiasm in this city for sports generally and in particular for college basketball.”
“We’re known, obviously, as a college football community, but there are a lot of college basketball fans, particularly transplants from other sections of the country who have been waiting to get their basketball appetites filled,” Yates said. “This has been a great opportunity for them to do that, and they are also enthusiastically volunteering to be a part of many of the activities we have going on.”
Some 100,000 fans are expected to converge on downtown — about 30 percent of whom will not have tickets to the games Saturday and Monday.
“We’ll have so much going on, there will be no problem keeping those 30,000 or so entertained,” Goldmacher said.
Ancillary events include Bracket Town, a four-day interactive fan fest with youth clinics, autograph sessions and various sports activities across 300,000 square feet of space inside the Georgia World Congress Center. Among other attractions: free concerts in Centennial Olympic Park, the Divisions II and III championship games at Philips Arena, a 5K road race and the “Final Four Dribble” in which 3,000 kids will dribble basketballs across a half-mile route near the Dome.
Getting everything in place has required a lot of logistical work — some of it by Atlanta-based UPS, an NCAA corporate sponsor, which says it has delivered 99 18-wheelers of cargo to the Georgia Dome.
The highest-profile delivery was the portable maple basketball court, shipped here last week from Michigan, where it was made.
“Then there are less-glamorous type things like the steel and structure that go into putting in the (temporary) seats,” said Hugh Allen, UPS’ managing director for entertainment logistics. “I was down at the Dome looking at some loads, and we were unloading basketball goals (for Bracket Town). Some of them are pretty sizable — 4,000 pounds a pop.”
Allen estimated that UPS has delivered about 4 million pounds of cargo to the Dome since March 1 from the NCAA and various vendors. Getting it here required driving a collective 1,056 hours and 63,408 miles, according to UPS. The cargo ranged from 18,200 seats to 72 basketballs to four pairs of scissors (for cutting down the nets) to one championship trophy.
Almost all of it, except the trophy, will be shipped back out after the championship game — some of it to Pittsburgh for use at the NCAA’s “Frozen Four” hockey championship event.
Another key participant in preparing for the Final Four has been the Georgia Tech Athletic Association staff. The NCAA requires a member school to serve as official “host” of the event each year. Tech filled that role at Atlanta’s 2002 and 2007 Final Fours and signed on again when the city made its bid for this one.
About 35 Tech staffers will be in the Georgia Dome during the event, providing support in two main areas — game management and media services. Game-management roles will include tasks such as working on the scorer’s table, serving as athletic trainers and locker-room attendants, checking in teams as they enter the Dome and providing medical personnel.
Preparing for the Final Four, Yates said, also has involved coordination among a number of other business, civic and governmental entities.
“It has been, to me, exhilarating to see how the project has been managed to the point of, now, this zenith of three basketball games,” Yates said. “But more importantly, really, what we have got here is four days of great entertainment and an opportunity to showcase Atlanta to the world.”
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