Stadia Magazine: Final Whistle, June 2020

Stadia Magazine gave its closing column to Jonathan O’Neil Cole in June 2020, with the industry shut down and no one sure what reopening would look like.

His argument was that the seating bowl was the wrong place to start. The industry had begun publishing distancing layouts, but a rebound depended on three things in order: readily available testing, then a proven vaccine, and then a visibly executed operations strategy that gives the public confidence the organisation is doing everything in its power. Almost nobody in the business could affect the first two. The third was entirely within reach, and that is where he argued the conversation belonged.

The practical consequence was that the first impression decides it. Parking, tailgating and the security line are where a returning crowd forms its judgement, well before anyone reaches a seat. He made the case for investment in distancing iconography, clear messaging, wayfinding and sensitivity training for security staff, and drew the comparison with air travel after 2001: people accepted being pulled out of line at an airport, and never quite accepted it at a ballgame.

He also put a caution in front of the owner class. Public feedback at the time was mixed and often indifferent, with a good many people saying sports were not essential. The context mattered, he wrote: that judgement was personal health outweighing fandom, not a verdict on the industry.

The two white papers behind the column are on this site: Part One and Part Two.

Source: “Final Whistle: The New Normal” by Jonathan O’Neil Cole AIA, NCARB, NOMA, Stadia Magazine, June 2020, page 50.

The framework Pendulum uses to judge a venue as a long term civic and financial system is set out in S.C.O.R.E.