Lucas Oil photos courtesy MediaWright Photography and Lucas Oil Stadium
THE CITY’S NFL venue serves many more purposes than just giving the Indianapolis Colts a place to play, as illustrated by the roughly 75 other events it hosts in a year. And most of those are nothing like a football game, ranging from gaming conventions, to mega-star concerts, to major marching band competitions. Lucas Oil Stadium director Eric Neuburger says the hulking facility can transform to handle just about anything with enough notice.
Planning for most of the stadium’s big events starts far, far in advance. NCAA men’s and women’s basketball Final Four hosting privileges are awarded years before the jump ball, and the Lucas Oil folks start strategizing right away. “When a show moves from a prospect to an actual booking, that’s when the planning really begins,” Neuburger says. “And the bigger the event, the further out they tend to be booked.”
Each must slide seamlessly into a tiny window. One of the trickiest issues is figuring out when an event can start setting up at the stadium and how long they have to break things down and clear out before the Next Big Thing rolls into town. “We have more than 200 days a year of high-quality events that are booked sometimes 10, 12 years out,” Neuburger says. “Availability is our biggest challenge in deciding which events we can have and which we can’t.”
If an event isn’t overly complicated, the stadium can be flipped with surprising speed. For instance, when Lucas Oil hosted the 2024 Drum Corps International World Championship Finals, which concluded at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, August 10, it took until after 2 a.m. on Sunday, August 11, to break down its gear and clear it out. Yet the facility was reconfigured by 8 a.m. that morning for a Colts preseason game.
Setting up for a Colts game is dialed in. While each year brings some new elements, the stadium crew typically faces exactly the same setup procedures all season. That said, the recent five-hour turnover after the Drum Corps finals is as close as they care to cut it.
The U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials event was the most novel undertaking. Nothing about it was simple. Workers had to install a massive, Italian-built, Olympic-caliber competition pool, plus an auxiliary pool, then supply them with 2 million gallons of water, and inside a facility designed to accommodate pro football. Neuburger gives it an 8 or 9 on the difficulty scale. “It was a complex build that took place with the world watching,” he adds.
The most complex recurring event is the men’s Final Four. It lasts for weeks, features a long list of ancillary activities that changes with each rendition, and requires the placement of 22,000 additional seats and a special, raised court. “We also build additional media tables throughout the stands,” Neuburger says. “There’s a lot going on.”
The 2021 men’s Final Four was by far the weirdest. Neuburger, who calls it the Covid Final Four, keeps a unique souvenir in his office: a cardboard cutout of himself. It, along with hundreds of similar cutouts—all pictures of stadium staffers and regular civilians in sports attire—were stuck in the empty seats surrounding the relatively anemic crowd of human fans, who were kept apart for the sake of social distancing. “A paper version of myself got to watch part of March Madness,” he says.
Installation of event-specific props and equipment is accomplished by a mix of local and imported workers. Events typically send in a “brain trust” of organizers who oversee the necessary tweaks the stadium needs to accommodate its shows. But most of the work is done by a trusted cadre of local tradespeople with experience setting up special events. “Many of them are contractors who we use regularly, though sometimes specialty workers are brought in by the client,” Neuburger says. Even concerts are typically handled not by hordes of sweating roadies but by locals.
Lucas Oil has been the setting for all kinds of big events. Except for … baseball, mostly because of all the glass windows and fragile electronics that wouldn’t mix with high-speed baseball impacts. “There are ways to work around that, but they end up being so expensive that the client doesn’t want to undertake them,” Neuburger says. Also, he can’t recall a rodeo or a circus.
Somewhere in Indy is a hill of dirt. Two monster truck shows and a motorcycle extravaganza sit more-or-less permanently on Lucas Oil’s annual schedule. To stage them, the stadium’s athletic field is covered with heavy plastic sheeting and two layers of 0.75-inch-thick plywood. Then 400 dump trucks worth of dirt is layered on the stadium floor. “The client brings in their dirt artists, as I call them, to design the track and carve it up exactly the way it needs to be,” Neuburger says. Afterward, the dirt is trucked back and piled once more into a giant mound until next year. During dirt-intensive gatherings, the soil is kept moist to fight dust, but it still gets everywhere. “We have to wipe down every surface in the building afterward,” Neuburger says.
It’s typically easier to tear down a show than to install it. “We’re taking three or four days to set up for Taylor Swift in November, but it’ll be gone in one day,” Neuburger says.
The permanent football game surface is covered up during other events but almost never removed. The turf was pulled up for the swimming trials because the weight of the pools might have damaged its appearance. When 2 million gallons of water isn’t involved, the turf is adequately protected by a covering called Omni Deck, which can handle the weight of anything from large crowds to semis.
A last-minute issue hasn’t threatened to delay an event—except once. An automated confetti cannon randomly went off an hour before Lucas Oil Stadium opened for the 2021 Final Four. “We had to scramble to clean up the place,” Neuburger says. “You never know what’s going to happen, but we’ve been lucky to not have had anything that was an actual showstopper.”
