Changes to Carver-Hawkeye Arena seating expected to bring some students closer to court

IOWA CITY — Iowa Athletics is making some adjustments to the seating configuration at basketball games that will most notably bring some students closer to the court, athletics director Beth Goetz said Thursday.

Goetz indicated the changes are not drastic and have not been finalized.

“You can’t relocate 3,000 students without making significant change, but when we could make some improvements, we wanted to take an opportunity to do that,” Goetz said after the university’s monthly Presidential Committee on Athletics meeting.

Iowa needed to “shift things a little bit” so that the visiting team’s tickets are directly behind the visiting team’s bench, Goetz said. It is “not a new Big Ten policy,” but something the conference “asked us to address.”

The upcoming change will require Iowa to “move some of our fans that are sitting in lower seating.”

“You don’t like to do that,” Goetz said. “We aren’t the only school that had to make an adjustment. I thought we were pretty close behind the bench.”

Meanwhile, plans for a major renovation of Carver-Hawkeye Arena are in the focus group stage, in addition to the philanthropic efforts necessary to “see if we can get the project off the ground.”

“Essentially what we’re taking is our preliminary study plans that our architects did for us and taking that out to our fans to say, ‘What do you think?’” Goetz said.

As part of the focus groups, Iowa is “trying to get a feel for what type of seating” fans want.

“So do we have not enough premium?” Goetz said. “Too much premium? Is it not in the right space?”

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