Zach Rutledge: Hello everybody, welcome to doing Indy. I’m your host, Zach Rutledge. I’m in Downtown, Indianapolis in the White River State Park area at the newly renovated and recently reopened NCAA Hall of Champions and I love what they’ve done with this place. They’ve transformed this building from a venue that you just walk around and look at things into a place that you could have a true experience.
C. Dennis Cryder: The reason we’re having the new and improved Hall of Champions because of a fire that happened almost a year and a half ago. And so it gave us an opportunity to rethink about what we want to know and improve Hall of Champions to be and so what you see around today is actually the result of that.
In our first version, we were really hanged up about explaining the NCAA through graphics. It was a lot of flat art, a lot of images and all the type of thing, so what we did in the second version, we call it NCAA Hall of Champion 2.0 version. We decided to go with more interactive so throughout the Hall of Champions, you’ll see things like an—play where you actually can bat, you can play, kick soccer ball, you can play football and things like that. So, we wanted people to get involve and participate and obviously have fun.
Kelly Dodds: One of the things that we were thinking about when we were deciding, when we started those first meetings is who really is our key ions and we decided that maybe we wanted to focus more on the corporate groups, the best way to do that would be maybe to offer some meeting spaces. We have a conference center over there, but by bringing the meeting spaces into the hall you offer so much more because they are walking in and during their breaks they are coming out. They are looking at exhibits. And the first thing I hear is, “Oh wow! This is so great. I want to book this or I want to this. This will be a great place for us to have our Christmas party next year.” Everyone has said that what we were trying to get to, they get that. And they have echoed just kind of almost repeated what we’ve said without us even saying it, just walking and seeing that—got to have something here.
C. Dennis Cryder: One of the things we’re focused on this is how do we keep the Hall of Champions fresh. And one of the things we always have to do is bring a new content, so in this facility we have the area to expand and shrink when we need to base on the content that we have.
The whole message of the NCAA Hall of Champions is about the student athletes. When you go to the NCAA Hall of Champions there is a message about what it takes to be a student athlete, the balance of their life, this classroom and also the practice field. That is the real message of the Hall of Champions.
Zach Rutledge: As you can see there are just tons going on at the NCAA Hall of Champions. I mean so much in fact that we can’t show it all to you in four minutes, so yes that does mean we’re out of time. So for Doing Indy, I’m your host, Zach Rutledge. This here is JJ and we’ll see you next time.
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