In one night, Rupp Arena will transform from basketball to bull riding. Here’s how.

As soon as the Kentucky women’s basketball team finished its SEC opener against Arkansas on Thursday night, Rupp Arena was to undergo a dramatic transformation ahead of one of the venue’s most distinct weekends of 2024.

For the seventh consecutive year, the Professional Bull Riders’ (PBR) Pendleton Whisky Velocity Tour is coming to Rupp Arena, with the event taking place Friday and Saturday nights in downtown Lexington.

This means Rupp Arena will take on a whole new look this weekend.

In a phone interview with the Herald-Leader, Kevin McCoy — the operations manager for the Velocity Tour — detailed the process of getting Rupp Arena ready to host two nights of professional bull riding.

“We are a very well-oiled machine,” McCoy said. “... There are always variables, every building is different. You can’t predict the weather. Sometimes things go sideways, but we’re able to adapt and pivot and to reassess anything that comes up, (to) keep the wheels on.”

McCoy said his team begins advance work on the production side of staging a Velocity Tour event about two to three months before the event date.

This allows McCoy — who is about to begin his sixth full season working with the Velocity Tour — and his team ample time to line up a range of production and technical details ahead of the event.

Among the items McCoy and his team confirm and double-check during this process are infrastructure elements like an arena’s dimensions, dock space, dressing rooms, floor layout, lighting and power, as well as the schedule of events.

McCoy said that, normally, the Velocity Tour has all day the Thursday of an event week to complete the production load-in.

Because of the UK women’s basketball game though, that won’t be the case this week. Instead, the process was to begin after the Wildcats and Razorbacks finished their game late Thursday night.

“We have to speed up that process so that we’re ready for (the) show on Friday night,” McCoy said. “... We’ve done this plenty of times. Our team is more than capable of handling an overnight load-in.”

How Rupp Arena changes from basketball to bull riding

So what goes into this load-in process to transform Rupp Arena from a college basketball palace to a venue fit for bull riding?

The Rupp Arena basketball court — which has already received its fair share of attention this season after a new playing surface was installed, then removed after just one game — will be cleared from the arena floor.

This will leave the bare concrete surface of the Rupp Arena floor exposed, and ready for the Velocity Tour to take over.

First come production elements such as the audio rig, lighting rig and video rig. McCoy referred to these items as the “concert elements” of the Velocity Tour.

“That’s about 14 rigging points, which is pretty small compared to most rock-and-roll shows,” McCoy said.

Next comes the dirt. And a lot of it.

At least 400 cubic yards of dirt will coat the concrete floor, forming a uniform dirt layer that’s about 8 to 9 inches thick.

“Anywhere that we are putting steel and livestock, we’ve got to have dirt down on the floor,” McCoy said.

After the dirt comes the steel, which is used for everything from the bucking chute and the perimeter fence separating the bull riding from the crowd, to the holding pens where livestock is kept.

“It’s a huge maze of steel and gates and panels,” McCoy said.

PBR uses stock contractors to supply the bulls used during events like the one taking place this weekend in Lexington. McCoy said that for any one night of PBR competition, a minimum of 50 head of livestock is needed.

A total of 35 to 40 competitors will ride a bull during competition, but extra bulls are needed as backups.

“We always have more bulls than we have contestants on site,” McCoy said.

The bulls are brought in by the stock contractor, loaded into the arena and sorted through different holding pens before being ridden.

Familiarity with Rupp Arena — both from a layout perspective and from having gone through the motions of staging a Velocity Tour event in the venue before — helps make the process of getting ready for the event easier.

“(It’s a ) huge building, fantastic building to play in,” McCoy said. “... For Lexington, it’s one that we have done multiple years. So we have a great relationship with the building, from the administration all the way on down to the ushers and the box office scanners and security folks who are working with us, because we’ve just been there so many times.”

The Velocity Tour will be celebrating its 10th-year anniversary season in 2024, and this weekend’s stop in Lexington serves as the season-opening event. The Velocity Tour also has a Saturday night event in Portland.

Rupp Arena — which seats more than 20,000 people for Kentucky men’s basketball games — is slated to be one of the largest-capacity venues used by the Velocity Tour during its 2024 season.

But it’s far from the only basketball-focused venue on the schedule.

Other stops for the Velocity Tour this year include Saturday’s event in Portland at the Moda Center (where the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers play), a late-January date in Greenville, South Carolina, at Bon Secours Wellness Arena (where the 2024 SEC women’s basketball tournament will be held) and an early-March date in Knoxville, Tennessee, at Thompson-Boling Arena at Food City Center, home to the University of Tennessee’s basketball teams.

When asked about what sticks with him from overseeing several Velocity Tour stops at Rupp Arena in recent years, McCoy touched on a familiar refrain that several opposing basketball coaches have also noted.

The atmosphere.

“It is so loud in there,” McCoy said. “Whoever designed that building for the acoustics of just making sure that the roar of the crowd is amplified ... it is consistently one of the loudest shows and one of the loudest crowds that we have.”

PBR Lexington

What: PBR’s Pendleton Whisky Velocity Tour

When: 7:45 p.m. Friday and 6:45 p.m. Saturday

Where: Rupp Arena

Tickets: Online at ticketmaster.com, RuppArena.com and PBR.com, or by calling PBR customer service at 1-800-732-1727.