Minot State Investigates Collapsed 'Sports Bubble'

Minot State University is awaiting word on assessment of why the school's air-supported athletics dome collapsed during a blizzard last week. 

The "sports bubble" went down last Wednesday, forcing the school to cancel all planned activities in the structure. The school is now waiting on the company that supplied the structure back in December of 2016 to send representatives who will assist with the assessment. 

MSU athletic director Andy Carter, told the Minot Daily News that the bubble will need to be re-inflated to determine damage before it is again deflated and put into storage. The bubble had originally been scheduled to come down on May 4. 

Carter said the bubble should be repairable but the cost of those repairs is uncertain. 

“It’s covered in snow now,” he said. “You can’t even really get to it right now.”

Also uncertain is the fate of the equipment stored in the bubble. 

“It could be a big issue. We don’t even know because we can’t see it," Carter said. "So we don’t know if it’s damaged or it’s just sitting there under the tarp." 

The bubble has been used as a fallback location for softball games during inclement weather, and MSU planned to hold a spring football game int he bubble. 

Staff plans to begin rescheduling and searching for other places to practice this week. 

“There’s not a lot of options. For baseball, softball, we have batting cages in the Dome. So we’re just going to sit down with our coaches and our staff and kind of brainstorm – figure out what we might do,” he said. “The majority of our coaches would rather not practice on the Dome floor, but at this point, we’ve got the rest of this month of baseball and softball, so they’ll do what they need to do to keep their teams ready.”