Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse Keeps It ‘World-Classy’ For 30 Years

LONG-TERM: Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse has undergone around $250 million worth of improvements since the Cavaliers were acquired by Dan Gilbert.

Venue opened as Gund Arena

Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse shoots for the stars of sports and entertainment in Cleveland, Ohio.

Home court for the NBA Cleveland Cavaliers since it opened in October 1994, the downtown arena is celebrating three decades of sports and music milestones while keeping an eye on the future.
“We talk a lot about Cleveland and northeast Ohio being a world-class city without the world-class ego and that’s ultimately what our building embodies every day,” said Nic Barlage, Cleveland Cavaliers, Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse and Rock Entertainment Group CEO.

Opened as Gund Arena, Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse has a noteworthy past. It was preceded by the 12,000-capacity Cleveland Arena, which opened in 1937. The arena was the first home of the Cavaliers in 1970 and known as the site of the Alan Freed-produced Moondog Coronation Ball in 1952, which is regarded as the first rock and roll concert. After falling into disrepair, the downtown venue was replaced in 1974 by the 20,273-seat Richfield Coliseum, 25 miles south of Cleveland.

Reclaiming downtown from the rural outskirts was a game changer. The Gund Arena opened as part of the Gateway Sports and Entertainment Complex, which is owned by the city and Cuyahoga County and is managed by the nonprofit Gateway Economic Development Corp. The complex consists of the 19,432-capacity Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse and the adjacent Progressive Field, a 34,830-seat baseball park that serves as home of the Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Guardians, which also opened in 1994.

Billy Joel performed for the grand opening Oct. 17 and the Cavaliers played their first regular season game on Nov. 8. The Cavs had their biggest win of their inaugural season at the new arena on Feb. 15, 1995, when the team beat Shaquille O’Neal and the Orlando Magic 100-99 in overtime.

“It was the shot that gave us an even longer legacy of opportunity,” Barlage said. “We have gone through our evolution as a venue, and I give our chairman Dan Gilbert a lot of credit; we have invested significantly into the venue from a private perspective.”

Barlage puts the investment at “almost a quarter of a billion dollars” and spending began in 2005 when the NBA approved the purchase of the Cavs by the investor group led by Gilbert, the chair and founder of Quicken Loans. The arena was renamed Quicken Loans Arena and renovations included new wine-colored seats, state-of-the-art scoreboard, video and sound system upgrades, new arena graphics and signage and improvements to security, locker rooms and suites.

In 2007, the Utah Grizzlies minor league hockey team relocated to Cleveland and became the Lake Erie Monsters (now the Cleveland Monsters) of the American Hockey League. On April 7, the arena hosted the NCAA Women’s Final Four for the first time. On June 2, the Cavaliers beat the Pistons in the Eastern Conference Finals to advance and host their first NBA Finals at the FieldHouse.

“We have been fortunate to have had two All Star games here. We just hosted the most prolific Women’s Final Four in the history of the NCAA, and that was our second Women’s Final Four that was here,” Barlage said. “We’ve had a calling card of hosting massive sporting events on top of five NBA Finals that have made what was Gund Arena, then Quicken Loans Arena and now Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse a must-play destination.”

Following the return of native son LeBron James in 2014, the Cavaliers won the NBA championship in 2016, the city’s first big league title since 1964. The arena hosted the Republican National Convention in 2016 and announced expansion plans that would last two years at a cost of $185 million, with 70% funded by the arena and 30% from public sources.

The renovation expanded the arena’s square footage from 95,380 to 152,970, adding a new glass façade, 42,530 square feet of new public space in the atrium and 62 redesigned suites. The venue was renamed Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in April 2019 to coincide with the floor-to-elevated-ceiling transformation. Akron, Ohio, favorites The Black Keys played for the grand reopening.
The transformation “allowed us to invest in some of the best technology and some of the best experiences across the board,” Barlage said.

The renovations included an art program curated by Library Street Collective and privately funded by Gilbert and his wife Jennifer. The 100-piece collection includes site-specific works, including a basketball rippling across a white background, from 22 diverse local, national and international artists.

Technology was top of mind, including the addition of the Power Portal, a 360-degree tunnel with 2,200 square feet of LED panels and more than 24 million pixels to create an immersive audio-visual entryway connecting the atrium with the street-level concourse. Also new was the Curtain Wall, a 77,100-square-foot aluminum façade that can be illuminated with 1,500 different color combinations. The main scoreboard, dubbed “Humongotron,” is the fourth-largest scoreboard in an NBA arena.

Cleveland put the Rock in Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse for the first time in 2021 with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Typically held in New York City or Los Angeles, Cleveland was the big winner with a total economic impact of $50.7 million, $18.7 million in income earned by local employees, $4.7 million in state and local tax revenues resulting from the additional economic activity and an estimated 30,455 unique attendees, 90% being visitors from outside of Cuyahoga County. The 2024 ceremony will be held at the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse on Oct. 19 and streamed live on Disney+ and airs after on ABC.

“We are an incredible sports town, but what is equally notable is the fact that we have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame right down the street from us,” Barlage said, referring to the Rock Hall museum’s physical location in downtown Cleveland. “Now, we are actually on the rotation for hosting the induction ceremony here in partnership with the Rock Hall and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation and you have an added element I’ll call an experiential value proposition for the artists.”

While major renovations in 2019 focused on public-facing aspects of the venue, overhauls didn’t stop there. In 2022, two bars were added to the venue’s club level and in 2023 a sports book and revamped team store were added and there was a shift to prioritizing the artist and entourage back-of-house experience.

“It’s always been a priority of ours to make sure that we put Cleveland’s best foot forward when we’re bringing in nationally and internationally acclaimed acts to northeast Ohio,” said Barlage. “We want it to be a world-class experience.”

The key was versatility and being able to accommodate visiting teams as well as high-profile one-off events, with the ability to configure spaces depending on need while offering high-end finishes and amenities, including a $15 million remodel of event-level dressing rooms, called Star Rooms.

“It gives us another exclamation point,” explained Barlage. “The secret behind the scenes is the experience that we curate for the artists, for the managers, for the promoters. We want to make this a prescriptive experience.”

The Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse has put those refurbished spaces to use in 2024 with the largest NCAA Women’s Final Four event in history, with an estimated 18.9 million broadcast viewership and 436,055 in full tournament attendance, a Division 1 women’s basketball championship attendance record. In October, they will host the return of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, the venue’s 30th anniversary celebration on Oct. 17 and the start of the Cavaliers’ preseason.

“We have some of the greatest fans in the world and now we have a venue that is celebrating 30 years excellence and it is really important for us as we move forward to continue to maintain and build upon the reputation but also the momentum that we have created over 30 years,” said Barlage.

Looking ahead, the FieldHouse Now app launches on Feb. 12, 2025. The app makes fans part of the game, including a light show triggered by their phones during the game’s most hyped-up moments. The app includes countdown triggers that remind fans when it’s time to head back to their seats for tip-off, halftime or other meaningful moments during the game.

In addition, Rocket Mortgage will become the presenting sponsor for Canon’s C-View technology, renamed FieldHouse Vision. The Cavaliers are the only NBA team with this in-venue camera system, which records and recreates the on-court action. The result is a lifelike experience that virtually transports fans to the center court from their home.

“We look at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse as this brick-and-mortar platform that is the living room for the world to look at Cleveland in a positive and impactful fashion,” said Barlage. “That’s a primal responsibility of ours to make sure we have a venue that not only attracts world-class events, but can really put them on without a hitch and showcase all the positive attributes of our city and Northeast Ohio.”