Every March the eyes of the sports world fix on the basketball court — on the athletes, the brackets, the buzzer-beaters. Tremendous care goes into player safety at the college level, including the floor surface, the padding behind the baskets, and ensuring trainers and medical personnel are courtside.
And yet such precautions sometimes fall short, regardless of the sport. In 2015, Reggie Bush sued the St. Louis Rams and the operators of the Edward Jones Dome (now The Dome at America’s Center) after slipping on an unpadded concrete surface along the sideline. A jury ultimately returned a verdict approaching $12.5 million, including $7.5 million in punitive damages.
If a professional athlete in peak condition, with league staff nearby, can be the subject of a multimillion-dollar premises liability verdict, consider what the exposure looks like in the stands at March Madness, where tens of thousands of fans are navigating bustling concourses, crowded stairwells and spilled drinks across a session that can stretch most of a day. Falls account for more than 8 million emergency room visits annually in the United States, and sports venues are far from immune. The legal exposure for operators who fail to address known hazards is significant, with stakes extending well beyond the scoreboard.
Kelsey Closson, vice president of recreation at K&K Insurance, works with hundreds of mixed-use sports venues across the country and has a front-row seat to how facilities prepare — and occasionally stumble — when a marquee event rolls in. While March Madness provided a timely context for a discussion with Closson, she’s quick to point out that the real lessons apply far beyond the NCAA tournament. Any time a venue steps outside its normal operational rhythm to host a large-scale event, the same dynamics are in play.
The multi-use reality
Today’s major sports arenas are already multi-use facilities by design. They host concerts, NBA and NHL games, and college events as a matter of course, often switching configurations multiple times a week. In that sense, Closson says, a basketball tournament isn’t necessarily foreign territory for a venue that already cycles through different setups regularly.
“These are professionals,” she says. “They’re used to doing this.”
The risk, then, isn’t usually about unfamiliarity, but rather scale and duration. A tournament format that sells session-based tickets encompassing multiple games in a single day introduces crowd dynamics that a typical single-game event simply doesn’t generate. Fans arrive at staggered times, drift to concessions between games, or leave early when the second half of a one-sided game or an entire session feels optional. The result is a much higher volume of crowd movement throughout the building over a much longer window of time.
“The crowd movement is the biggest difference,” Closson says. “You don’t want too many people in one area, and you have to make sure slip, trip and falls don’t happen. Once you have thousands of people through a spot, one tiny spot can become highlighted in a negative way.”
The session-length factor
It sounds almost obvious, but the math of longer events matters. More hours equates to more laps up and down stairs, more visits to the concessions stand and more opportunities for the kinds of minor mishaps that multiply across large crowds. Alcohol consumption rises with session length, fatigue sets in and the same stair riser that 10,000 people navigated without incident that morning can suddenly become a hazard later in the day.
“The more times you get up and walk the stairs, the more opportunity to trip on stairs that have been the same for thousands of people,” says Closson. “But the more people you have in, the more slips, trips and falls you’re going to have.”
From an insurance standpoint slip-and-fall exposure is the core concern for spectator-facing liability at venues like these. Coverage for participants — the athletes themselves — falls to the teams and governing bodies. But everything that happens in the stands, on the concourse and in the parking lot is squarely in the venue’s lane. Closson says most major facilities carry appropriate coverage for these events, but the key is communication and making sure your insurance agent understands the nature and scope of what you’re hosting.
Work with what you know
Security protocols for a major tournament are typically set by the governing body. In the case of the NCAA, the organization drives those standards. But as an event grows in profile, so does the potential security calculus. As tournaments advance into later rounds, the attendance of high-profile political figures or other VIPs can introduce an elevated security posture that venue teams may not have anticipated in their original planning.
Closson also flags a risk factor that’s easily overlooked, noting that operators don’t know which teams are playing until very late in the process. That matters because fan dynamics vary enormously depending on matchups. A game between two programs from the same region, or a storied rivalry within a given conference, carries different risks than a neutral matchup, and security staff need to be prepared for that.
“You could have Michigan versus Ohio State,” she notes. “That’s going to be a different environment than Michigan versus someone else. And you just don’t know that until last minute.”
Closson advises that operators make sure they have a security plan that can scale for the unexpected, and communication channels with local law enforcement should be established early.
Sweat the small stuff
Perhaps the most transferable lesson from Closson’s experience isn’t about the big, high-profile moments, but rather the small ones that compound. She describes a venue that had recurring tripping incidents over a particular curb. The curb met every code requirement, but people kept tripping. It took a handful of incidents before the operator painted it for visibility and eventually redirected foot traffic entirely with a planter. By then, a large event had already turned a minor issue into a string of claims.
“If you’re more reactive to that [risk potential], then when you have a huge event, you’re not having a dozen people trip over the same curb,” Closson says. “Just look at your loss history and your incident reports. See if something is going to snowball on you.”
That guidance scales to any venue or event. Whether you’re running a regional high school tournament or a multiday, nationally televised showcase, the fundamentals don’t change: study your incident history, fix the small things before the crowds arrive, staff for reactivity and partner with local authorities early. The venues that do this well don’t usually make the news, which is exactly the point.
The invisible risk zone
While spectators see the polished surface of a tournament-ready arena, the underground and back-of-house areas tell a different story. What’s typically designed around one home team and one visiting team must suddenly accommodate a rotating cast of programs, including different staff, equipment and movement patterns cycling through the same corridors.
“Someone’s driving a golf cart with chairs, and there’s just more people in that underground area,” says Kelsey Closson, vice president of recreation at K&K Insurance. “There’s more opportunity for those silly mistakes like someone backing into people, because there’s not usually that many people there.”
Surface conversion compounds this. When a venue is cycling between configurations — basketball floor, hockey ice and back again — the logistics of moving equipment on and off create additional exposure in those already-congested spaces. It’s manageable, but it’s not invisible.
