Big on B-Ball
By K. Robert Wendel

Basketball is big on northern Arizona's Indian reservations and a basketball hoop is standard issue for most of the small homes that dot the wide-open desert.

And with the recent completion of a new sports arena at Ganado High School, players and parents now have a world-class facility for their world-class hoop dreams.

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"Basketball is king on the reservation," said Larry Manuelito, a principal with design/builder ChuskaSahara, which built the 100,000-sq.-ft. facility in Ganado, on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. "People come from all over, so you better get there early. It's standing room only."

Chuska is constructing the $16 million project under a design-build contract.

The school, which has 800 students, draws children from a 60-mi. radius. The small community regularly blossoms from just 2,000 people to more than 5,000 during game days.

The facility, with a seating capacity of 5,500, is the largest high school basketball arena north of Phoenix..

The project is part of a larger plan to transform the high school campus into a high- tech center of learning. Plans are also calling for a new agricultural building and rodeo arena, both of which are expected to soon start construction. Carter & Burgess is the architect and the Phoenix office of ChuskaSahara is the general contractor.

The arena features amenities that any professional basketball player is familiar with, including break away hoops on the backboard, wood floors and 40,000 sq. ft. of clear span space.

Designers from the Phoenix office of Carter & Burgess paid close attention to lighting and acoustics, allowing versatile uses such as music and drama. They also designed the basketball floor so it could be changed from one court to three practice courts by rolling in the portable bleachers.

The project uses a combination of building systems, with a Butler Building at the core. The arena relies on a pre- engineered roof truss system capped with a steel, standing- seam roof. Because of the poor soils across the reservation, the arena's 5-in. concrete slab sits on 300 piers ranging from 18 -in. to 24 -in. in diameter.

The soils across the reservation have led to many problems for building owners.

"The soils are super expansive and collapsible with silt and clay," said Jerry Johnston, senior vice president of ChuskaSahara. "The tribes have had bad experiences with new schools falling apart because of the soils."

Because the site experiences runoff, designers developed a master plan for the campus so drainage issues could be addressed at the beginning of construction
Another site consideration was weather, not only for construction, but also for long-term durability.

"We wanted to make sure this building is as maintenance free as much as we could," said project manager Daniel Perez, an architect with Carter & Burgess. "The wind is strong, the temperatures drop rapidly and there's a lot of snow, so the expansion and contraction from the weather and the wind were prime engineering considerations."

The site features a sizable grade, so architects used the grade and tucked the arena into the side of a hill. Patrons enter the concourse on grade level, with the basketball court in a bowel approximately 50 ft. below grade. The basketball courts sit on top of locker rooms and offices.

On the exterior, contractors used aerated blown concrete block with a skim coat of EFIS.

"The aerated concrete block has good thermal properties, and if you don't ding it up too much on the interior and exterior, it's ready for paint without a lot of prep time," said Chuska project superintendent Larry Murphy. "You can cut it with a chainsaw, but it's pretty durable when it is up and in a plane."

The project relies on three evaporative coolers in the summer and radiant heating in the winter.

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