Chase Center Announces 5-Year Anniversary Events

WARRIORS BATTLEGROUND: The Golden State Warriors have continued the Dub City dynasty in the city by the Bay, winning an NBA championship in 2022. (Getty Images)

5-Year Anniversary Block Party Taking Place This Weekend

Five years after its opening, the new arena at the heart of San Francisco’s Mission Bay district has shown that big investments can pay off and major hurdles can be overcome, as Chase Center continues to ramp up its offerings, focused on the fan experience and with an eye to the future.

“We’re really fortunate to work in an industry where there’s a lot of sharing and best practices; there’s 29 other NBA teams that do the same thing that we do, but we’re not competing off the court,” said Warriors President and Chief Operating Officer Brandon Schneider. With dreams of a new Warriors arena going back years, and a lengthy pre-construction phase leading up to its groundbreaking, Schneider said a benefit was the ability to fine-tune plans and really focus on details in the design phase. “I think I went to 22 arenas in a three-year span and as a group we went to all of them, not to mention baseball stadiums and concert venues,” said Schneider.

Chase Center, a $1.6 billion arena project and $2 billion-plus overall mixed-use development, followed major arena projects including the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas and the $200 million renovation at State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Not only were Warriors ownership Peter Guber and Joe Lacob bringing a fully privately funded modern arena to a major urban center in one of the most expensive cities in the country, they were moving a perennial championship-caliber NBA team from its longtime home city, even if only a few miles across the San Francisco Bay.

In some ways, Chase Center gave way to other big-bet arena projects, $1 billion venues including Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, UBS Arena in New York and, more recently, the dazzling Sphere in Las Vegas and Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California.

“To make that level of commitment was unprecedented,” Schneider said of the Warriors, noting that Steve Ballmer’s Clippers arena project has since matched that dollar bracket for an NBA venue. Schneider says the price tag is a reflection of the amount of care and attention to detail that went into the fan experience at the arena, which means everything from scoreboards and concessions to catwalks and loading docks. “As we approach the five-year anniversary, we’re really proud,” he said. “We’re always going to work to get better but we feel we’ve accomplished that.”

With major investments including the largest continuous center-hung scoreboard in the NBA (before Intuit Dome’s two-sided Halo board debuted in August), a gantry system that brings the scoreboard into the ceiling completely out of view during non-basketball events and other touches, the fan experience mission continues with new technology in-house and new options in the mixed-used Thrive City development surrounding the arena.

“We’re fortunate to have a whole host of great technology partners, because when you build an arena, at least for us, we looked not at what do we need today, but what do we want to build for the next 30 to 50 years,” Schneider said. To that end, Chase Center was the first venue in North America to upgrade to Wi-Fi 6E, working with infrastructure partner HPE working out a roadmap for the next 10 years of tech.

“We have over 250 active Wi-Fi access points, so we have abundant coverage throughout the arena,” says Schneider, adding that reliable and high-speed internet connectivity is basically “table stakes” at a new arena, especially one in a tech hub like San Francisco. “It was a big undertaking and a big investment that we thought was really important,” he said.

Schneider says another focus was to make a customized mobile Warriors app that speaks to fans’ needs and enhances the experience, which requires some hands-on software.

“We made the investment with Accenture to build a custom app for the Warriors and Chase Center, which was again a significant investment, but we wanted to be able to customize the experience and what that allows us to do,” Schneider said.

The team, like many others, previously offered a more templated app, which is functional but lacks customization. “Some of the templated apps do one or two updates a year, and we do something like 50 updates a year. We’re able to constantly keep everything up to date and make adjustments on the fly in real time, given fan feedback.”

The investments are not only the brick and mortar but in people and culture, including regular Disney Institute staff training. It all seems to have paid off, as the Warriors, which won their most recent NBA championship in 2022 — their fourth since 2015 — ended the NBA season on a streak of 518 consecutive sellouts at Chase Center, including regular season and playoff games,. That started in December of 2012 when the team still played at Oracle Arena in Oakland, where the Dub City dynasty began.

“I love the trivia; I always ask this when it comes up at all company meetings: Our first sellout was against the New Orleans Hornets, who obviously don’t exist anymore,” said Schneider, adding that it’s the fifth longest sellout streak in NBA history.

The momentum looks to continue with a new WNBA team, the Golden State Valkyries calling Chase Center home for the 2025 season, debuting in May.

The team recently had an open house where season ticket depositors were invited to Chase Center for a preview of the Valkyries’ inaugural action. The team in July announced it had surpassed 15,000 season-ticket deposits, the first team in women’s sports to do so. Deposits were $25 per seat.

“Many of them hadn’t been to Chase Center before,” said Donna Daniels, who joined as arena general manager in 2022, adding that her first day on the job, the 2022 Championship Parade, is hard to beat.

“We love a lot about the Valkyries, but one thing is that it opens up a whole new audience for us,” said Daniels, noting her previous experience as part of the WNBA league office in 1997. “I had the opportunity to help launch the WNBA, so the Valkyries coming here is full circle for me. To be able on Saturday to talk to such passionate WNBA fans, women’s sports fans, Valkyries fans, was pretty special.” The Valkyries are the first WNBA expansion team since 2008.

To celebrate the five-year occasion, fans are invited to a block party at Thrive City, taking place Sept. 8 and featuring a family-friendly activities throughout the plaza, as well as a “Taste of Thrive City” sampling event featuring retailers. Throughout September, Chase Center will offer special food and beverage offerings including a five-piece macaron pack, The GOAT Five-Year Slice, and a Chase Center Sunset Punch cocktail. Additionally, as part of the Chase Center Art Collection, 55 signed posters from artists who have performed at the venue over the past five years will be installed at Portals 20 and 24.