Basketball
The stadium has also served as the home of the Vandal basketball teams, providing increased seating capacity over the venerable Memorial Gym (built in 1928), a block to the east. The basketball court is positioned at midfield on the south sideline, in front of the press box and the south grandstand, with temporary seating on the north, east, and west. The first basketball game was played against WSU on January 21, 1976, commemorated with a visit by Vandal great Gus Johnson. The main court was originally smooth tartan rubber, poured directly onto the pavement floor, resulting in a very hard and unforgiving surface. After eight seasons it was replaced with a conventional hardwood floor in the fall of 1983.
During basketball games, the converted Kibbie Dome is now referred to as the Cowan Spectrum, named for Bob and Jan Cowan, who financed the current configuration. Since February 2001, the new basketball layout has been separated from the rest of the stadium by massive black curtains to give the court a more intimate "stadium-within-a-stadium" feel, with a reduced seating capacity of 7,000. Temporary Daktronics scoreboards are placed over the north and south stands during games. (video)
During the early 1980s, with Don Monson as head coach, the Kibbie Dome was considered one of the 20 toughest home courts in college basketball by Sports Illustrated. Additional temporary seating was gradually increased on the north basketball sideline and attendance exceeded 11,000 for several games during the 1982-83 season. From January 1980 to February 1983, the Vandals won 43 consecutive games at the Kibbie Dome, and Monson's home record in his final four seasons was 51-2 (.962). The venue hosted three Big Sky Conference men's basketball tournaments (by winning the regular season title), in 1981, 1982, and 1993. (The Vandals departed the Big Sky for the Big West in 1996, then to the WAC in 2005.)
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Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)