Inside the creation of Raptors' 'amazing' new Tampa practice facility

It’s important to point this out, right off the top: No weddings were harmed in the making of this practice facility.

And there are no showers. Building out a bathing area in the middle of a hotel ball room on barely a moment’s notice was setting the (soap) bar too high, even for the Toronto Raptors and their partners in their race against the clock, BaAM Productions.

The result is Kyle Lowry and his teammates will have to leave work a bit sweaty and salty on their way back to their temporary Tampa abodes.

We’ll presume they’ll survive. The people who moved heaven and earth to make sure the Raptors would have a place to practice, train and rehabilitate in Tampa all on a moment’s notice?

They barely did.

But post-practice showers aside, when Lowry and the Raptors head to work at the JW Marriott on Water St. in downtown Tampa, they’ll be stepping into a one-month miracle. One month. That’s the amount of time the team had between learning they weren’t going to be able to start their season in Toronto and when they needed a facility in Tampa ready.

“It blew my expectations away,” said Raptors head coach Nick Nurse who saw it completed for the first time on Tuesday. “It really does when you first walk in. It’s amazing that they can do what they’ve done with this space. I dunno — it’s just everything just looks so great, first of all, and then second of all it is, yeah, we’ve got everything we need. We’ve got some courts, we’ve got the weight room, we got locker rooms, we’ve got great working spaces for our staff. Video room’s great. I think the training room’s big and expansive. So, like always, though, with our organization they’ve given us everything we need to be successful.”

None of it was a lock, right up to the last minute.

“I mean, honestly, it was the whole thing,” said Teresa Resch, the Raptors vice president of basketball operations and the point person for the entire enterprise, when asked what pleased her most about the finished product. “I didn’t know if this was really going to happen.”

For example? It was only last week that the Raptors were able to secure the two NBA-regulation floors from Walt Disney — floors that were in use for the NBA restart in the bubble. As final details go, it was a big one.

“Like [last week] it was on edge if Disney was going to have a contract for us to sign,” said Resch. “Everything takes time and we had none of it, so you’re on pins and needles hoping everything happens and most of it did. You have faith in it.”

The Raptors have faith in Resch. She was the person who shepherded the on-time and on-budget construction of the OVO Centre, hosting the grand opening on All-Star weekend in 2016, and it was her job to figure out how to make the organization feel at home at Walt Disney World Resort for two months as well.

Those experiences were valuable, but this was different.

“This was at warp speed,” she said.

The results are impressive. On the fourth floor of the brand-new Tampa luxury hotel, they were able to recreate almost everything an NBA team could dream of having, spread out across 65,000 sq. ft. (the OVO Centre is 68,000 sq. ft., but has a second story to work with). There are a pair of regulation courts; a fully rigged out treatment unit with hot and cold tubs and massage tables; locker rooms for the coaches and players as well as a locker room for female staff.

There’s a theatre for watching film complete with purple and red “up lighting” for dramatic effect. Nurse’s office is glass walled and larger than the one he has at OVO Centre, and even features some of the same prints and art from his workspace back home — “It’s pretty nice,” he said — and there is a lounge where he and his coaches can meet, which is adjacent to offices for the rest of the coaching staff to do prep work.

When the Raptors learned they would not be able to play in Toronto and settled on Tampa as their home-away-from-home, their first call was to BaAM Productions, a Toronto-based events company that has developed a reputation for scaling logistical mountains in record time. It was BaAM that transformed Sahlen Field in Buffalo for the Blue Jays this past summer and led venue conversion for the Winter Classic for the NHL since its inception. Shortly after New Year’s, they’ll descend on Tampa again to rig out another big project — Super Bowl LV.

“We like to think of ourselves as the SWAT team…. When the impossible needs to be done, we come in and knock it out,” said Garrett Mills, manager of production for BaAM. “[But we’ve] never had anything on this timeline.”

BaAM got a call from the Raptors on Nov. 18, and Mills was on the ground in Tampa three days later, doing site planning and coordination with the general contractor for the hotel, which is still in the finishing stages of construction and not open to the public yet — which is why the Raptors were able to commandeer a whole floor of event space for six months without having to bump any weddings being planned.

Being on the fourth floor had its advantages – it was the largest continuous space on the property – but also some complications: There was only one freight elevator and it was touch-and-go whether the basket stanchions would fit in it. The elevator broke down one day, but fortunately not the day they were bringing in the basketball equipment.

“With the courts and the baskets, we had well over 80,000 pounds of freight coming up,” said Mills. “If the elevator goes down that day it would have shot us in the foot completely.”

But the courts made it up, and before they were put together time was made for Raptors president Masai Ujiri to place a toonie under centre court for good luck.

The Raptors held their first formal practice on the new space on Wednesday, and the reviews were positive.

“It looks amazing. They did an amazing job,” said Raptors centre Alex Len. “They had like two weeks to put this whole thing together? They did an amazing job: two big courts, weight room. It’s hard to tell a difference.”

It’s been a theme. Everyone who has seen the practice facility rise out of a hotel ball room floor has been wowed, even though Resch has taken the early feedback with a pinch of salt.

“From what they told me, it’s good. I think they also understand how invested in it I am — not sure they would tell me if it was terrible. But, no, [it’s been positive].

“I guess the thing I feel most proud about is I think it’s going to be a space that we are going to feel comfortable in,” Resch added. “I think the weight room is great. It’s kind of out in the open in the pre-convention space, so it’s almost like it’s out in the hallway. But it’s great and it will be a gathering point. And honestly I think the coaches have a great area that — well, they’re going to come up with some great plays in here.

“I don’t know what exactly, but it’s going to be great.”

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