How Rupp Arena Will Transition from UK Basketball to Bull Riding Overnight

For the seventh consecutive year, the Professional Bull Riders’ (PBR) Pendleton Whisky Velocity Tour is coming to Rupp Arena in Lexington, Ky., with the two-day event starting mere hours after the University of Kentucky women’s basketball team plays its SEC opener Thursday night

In a phone interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader, Velocity Tour operations manager Kevin McCoy detailed the process of transitioning Rupp Arena from college basketball to professional bull riding both Friday and Saturday night.

Among the items McCoy and his team confirm and double-check during this process are infrastructure elements like an arena’s dimensions, dock space, dressing rooms, floor layout, lighting and power, as well as the schedule of events, the Herald-Leader reported.

“We are a very well-oiled machine,” McCoy said. “... There are always variables, every building is different. You can’t predict the weather. Sometimes things go sideways, but we’re able to adapt and pivot and to reassess anything that comes up, (to) keep the wheels on.”

As reported by Cameron Drummond of the Herald-Leader, McCoy said his team begins advance work on the production side of staging a Velocity Tour event about two to three months before the event date. This allows McCoy — who is about to begin his sixth full season working with the Velocity Tour — and his team ample time to line up a range of production and technical details ahead of the event.

Normally, the Velocity Tour has all day the Thursday of an event week to complete the production load-in. Because of the UK women’s basketball game, that won’t be the case this week. Instead, the process was to begin after the Wildcats and Arkansas Razorbacks finished their game late Thursday night.

The Rupp Arena basketball court will be removed, exposing the arena's bare concrete floor.

Next come what McCoy refers to as the “concert elements” of the Velocity Tour — the audio rig, lighting rig and video rig. “That’s about 14 rigging points, which is pretty small compared to most rock-and-roll shows,” McCoy said.

Then comes the dirt — at least 400 cubic yards of dirt will coat the concrete floor, forming a uniform dirt layer that’s about 8 to 9 inches thick.

“Anywhere that we are putting steel and livestock, we’ve got to have dirt down on the floor,” McCoy said.

After the dirt comes the steel, which is used for everything from the bucking chute and the perimeter fence separating the bull riding from the crowd, to the holding pens where livestock is kept. “It’s a huge maze of steel and gates and panels,” McCoy said, adding that for any one night of PBR competition, a minimum of 50 head of livestock is needed.

A total of 35 to 40 competitors will ride a bull during competition, but extra bulls are needed as backups. “We always have more bulls than we have contestants on site,” McCoy said.

The bulls are brought in by the stock contractor, loaded into the arena and sorted through different holding pens before being ridden. Familiarity with Rupp Arena — both from a layout perspective and from having gone through the motions of staging a Velocity Tour event in the venue before — helps make the process of getting ready for the event easier.

“Huge building, fantastic building to play in,” McCoy said. “... For Lexington, it’s one that we have done multiple years. So we have a great relationship with the building, from the administration all the way on down to the ushers and the box office scanners and security folks who are working with us, because we’ve just been there so many times.”

Rupp Arena, which seats more than 20,000 people for Kentucky men’s basketball games, is one of the largest-capacity venues used by the Velocity Tour during its 2024 season, but it’s not the only basketball-focused venue on the schedule, according to Drummond. Other stops for the Velocity Tour this year include a concurrent Saturday event in Portland at the Moda Center, home of the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers; a late-January date in Greenville, S.C, at Bon Secours Wellness Arena, where the 2024 SEC women’s basketball tournament will be held, and an early-March date at the University of Tennessee's Thompson-Boling Arena.