 Welcome to the sports playbook where we discuss solutions to issues that impact sports. I'm your host, Angela Hazelett. Today's guest is Mike Orvos, the event security manager for AMB Sports and Entertainment at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. We are here to discuss professional stadium security, making sports facilities safe. Welcome, Mike. Thank you, happy to be here. It's really good to see you and I know that AMB Sports and Entertainment, they operate the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which opened in August of 2017. The Mercedes-Benz Stadium is a world-class sports and entertainment venue in downtown Atlanta, home to the National Football League's Atlanta Falcons and the Major League Soccer's Atlanta United. So, Michael, what are some of the security challenges in operating a professional stadium in an urban location? Yeah, so especially here having two kind of anchor tenants, like you said, with soccer and football, and then countless of other things, whether it's concerts, private special events, trade shows, conventions, that kind of thing. We just have a lot of different events that we put on here, which always keeps us on our toes, keeps things interesting. But as far as being in an urban setting, we rely on our city partners, whether it's local law enforcement, Atlanta police, Fulton County here, the county that our city's in, up to our federal partners, whether it's the FBI, Homeland Security, constantly working with them on anything that they hear as far as intelligence, and as well as just kind of the general things of being in an urban setting, right? So, if you're at my life stadium in New York or what they have in Philly, where they're surrounded by parking lots versus what we have, where we're right downtown, ordering on, the complex kind of have where we've got the basketball arena next to where, Georgia World Congress Center, which hosts tons of huge conventions and kind of other trade shows. So we rely on a lot of like walk-up traffic from local hotels or public transportation, using MARTA, the local train system here in the city. So, we just kind of have to work with those partners a lot more, I think, than what you would in more of like a suburban setting where you're just relying on, your fans coming in, parking their cars, just a lot of like maintain that communication in those relationships, so you can really be able to, successfully coordinate things, make sure everyone's on the same page and nail down kind of the aspects of your game day and your event day and what make those unique. So, if that's interesting that you might have to, if there's some kind of incident that happens, you might have to coordinate and communicate with those other facilities and let them know what's going on and vice versa, so your plans can be impacted by what's happening in those adjacent locations. Are there any particular events that you host at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium that present unique security challenges? Yeah, I mean, anytime we have an event, kind of a mega event, if you will, right? So we've had the college football playoff, Super Bowl. We were supposed to do the Final Four in 2020 to like our Kansas last minute, but anytime you have an event where, you're on national television, we do the SCC Championship game here every year, particularly Peach Bowl is going to be a college football playoff game, a semi-final in 2022. So a lot of those events, you're working with even more partners, right? So, for the SCC Championship we're working with, obviously the South Eastern Conference, CBS for broadcasting. So it kind of just widens your group, widens the amount of stakeholders and just really compounds the importance of having those relationships, having the good communication with the groups that you work with year after year, like we do with the SCC, and the one-offs, whether it's Super Bowl or Final Four, they use Populous as kind of their event management group. Populous has done every Super Bowl since I think like the late 70s, they do the Olympics, they do the World Cup. So they are the people that kind of are the event managers for those big groups. So you just kind of open up your building to them, see kind of how you can be of service. And obviously with those events too, you have all of the ancillary events, right? So you've got fan festivals, concerts, hospitality packages. So it's really just taking in everything that you have to everything that you have for the event and what goes on around the event. And then security-wise it's, you know, how do we staff this from, you know, a guest services event security directive? What kind of help do we need from our local and state federal law enforcement partners to make sure that we have a good event? Making sure that if there's any kind of like VIPs, celebrities, politicians, dignitaries that you're meeting with their security teams, doing advances, monitoring their movements, supporting them with staff or even just information. It's just a lot of small details that go into those major events. And it's pretty cool to see how it all comes together from an operational side, you know, just at home, turn on the TV and watch the game. But there's so much more that goes into it in the weeks, months and even years for those major events coming into it. We had meetings about the final four and I think, you know, August of 2019 is when we started, or August of 2018 is when they really started ramping up. So, you know, 18 months in advance or stuff like that. And there's a lot of, it's interesting. I think you're talking a lot about these non-routine events. You have these routine events with your Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United that you sort of anticipate and know what to expect about these non-routine or infrequent irregular events probably require a lot more planning and communication. That changes the level of difficulty. I'm interested in the design of the facility. I think it's a really beautiful facility that Mercedes-Benz Stadium. One thing to note is the 360 degree kind of open concourse that you have. And I'm curious if you perceive that to be a security challenge or a benefit to managing the people in the stadium. Yeah, I think it's a benefit to just having, you know, the crowd flow either, you know, coming in through Ingress or leaving through Egress. And then obviously there's, you know, your areas of the concourse that are gonna be closer to the gates are gonna have more traffic than the ones that are on the opposite side of the stadium say. So, you know, it's all stuff that we've been able to recognize over the years that we've been open here. And just accordingly, but overall, I think just having that free flow of people is really important, as well as having like the wide concourses we do here where I've seen some other facilities, you have very narrow kind of choke points. Or like you said, you have, you know, some concourses that don't go all the way around the stadium. I was just at a pretty new hockey arena in early March where the top concourse didn't go all the way around. And being a first time visitor, you know, you don't know that just kind of a Thursday or wrench or you might not be as familiar with it obviously, like the season ticket holders figure it out, but you're always gonna have your first time visitors, your unique visitors that come in for, you know, concerts or could be, you know, Disney on ice type shows for a place like that. But overall, I think security was fine. And then I think the biggest difference it makes is for the fan experience, you know, just the different kind of like activations and bars that we have around here on the concourses. Then one of the cooler things that I thought they did was the 100 yard club of the 300 level. So basically the entire style side of the 300 level is, you know, Valhkins branded. It's got, you know, the full 100 yard football field pattern on the ground. And then you've got all kinds of different like neighborhood bars, concession stands. It's got columns that kind of have information about, you know, the Valhkins legends, legendary coaches, players, stuff like that. And I think it's really cool because in a lot of NFL stadiums, the 300 level was just kind of like forgotten about. It's kind of just the wild west, where, you know, you're just trying to pack in as many fans as possible. Not really a lot of thought is given to, you know, the feel or the hospitality, hospitality angle of it. And I think that's something that we did really hear where it's just, you know, smaller steps, but it really adds that premium feel to our upper levels that you don't get in a lot of stadiums. Wow, that sounds really interesting. And so that was really well thought out a part of the design to create, enhance a better experience on that level. Well, let's shift our conversation just a little bit and talk about the COVID-19 pandemic because it's certainly something that's impacted professional sports starting back in March of 2020. Really the NFL was at the forefront of establishing some COVID protocols, including closing facilities to most employees, including athletes. June of 2020, the league issued some reopening protocols which included controlling facility access, cleaning, disinfecting, physical distancing. So your organization eventually was able to schedule some games without fans and eventually returned to operations to a full stadium capacity. And I know the impact was great, losing millions of dollars in anticipated revenues in those early days. And your organization even went so far as to establish a million dollar emergency relief fund for those core employees who experienced hardship during the pandemic. So tell me from your perspective, what was it like to implement COVID mitigation procedures with everything just constantly influx and changing and trying to provide the safest but best experience possible? Yeah, it was definitely interesting. Just how fast things moved and then how fast things changed too. So it constantly felt like you were trying to shoot at a moving target and you didn't know how fast the target was moving and where it was headed next. So once we got through that initial, what's going on here? How do we need to react? Obviously, you rely on your V guidelines. So MLS and NFL went to the tier system of tier one was essentially players, coaches, trainers. Tier two was people who may have some contact with tier one folks. And then tier three is completely separate. So most of our staff outside of the facility folks, team operations, team security, fell into that tier three category. So we weren't necessarily subject to the testing requirements, but we were able to see here at the stadium, the players are spent the vast majority of their time at the team facilities, they're not here at the stadium except for match day. So we weren't really subject to that, but it was interesting just to see, when it went to an event day, we switched up a lot of things, switched up where our busy team locker room was so that we were able to kind of like cordon off one corner of the stadium to be the team and player side and keep that very separate. All of the different like physical barriers we built, I'm sure it was a great time for the plexiglass industry really well that year, just because of all the different kind of barriers people were making. We had walls, partitions, whether it was in the locker room or out on the surface level hallway to keep players and fans separate. So it was definitely an interesting time I will say being in Georgia, we didn't have a lot of the mitigation steps or governmental legislation type things that they did in some of the northern states where we did temperature screen and stuff and kind of a health questionnaire for associates of the stadium, but all of our fan facing stuff, we didn't have to do vaccination requirements or health screening or anything for the fans themselves. So I know that added a lot of like staff and a lot of hurdles for stadiums and venues in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, but that was something that we didn't have to do here. And then I think we did a good job of kind of being able to scale our operation to whether like you said, it was matches with no fans, which is very eerie to watch, just soccer match with 20 people watching or we went to 25% capacity. I think at the SEC, we were at about 30% capacity for 2020. And then as we ramped up to going half up to, now that we're back to full capacity, which it was really cool level, it'll say last year at the SEC championship game, but like walking out of the field, that was our, we've been back to full capacity, but as far as like actually getting every seat in the stadium field, that was one of our first events where we really had that. And it was just like, there was one of those moments where you're like, all right, this is pretty neat. This is what we suffered through all of those, like I said, kind of awkward days on certain times and then to be able to ramp up to that and see a full stadium like that was pretty special. And that's why you're there, right? To spread that experience. So, and it's interesting, when you talked about Georgia not having some of the same restrictions that other states and communities had, what about between the NFL protocols, MLS protocols, were there any distinctions or challenges that was anything different that where you had to treat different events and different staff differently? Did you have to run things differently, I guess, based on what event you were holding and how did you? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they both had tier systems, so it was kind of similar in terms of, keeping the groups separate and being able to implement contact tracing strategy and stuff like that. But obviously, just logistically, you have 53 plus players, plus the practice squad players on a football team and only about 20 on the soccer team. So, your logistics as far as getting them in the stadium off the bus through our screening, stuff like that, to post-game meals going to take away. But obviously, logistically setting up a post-game meal area for 100 players and staff is a lot differently for a soccer team. So there's just a lot of different nuances, a lot of different kind of curve balls we had to react to in order to set those up. And going to, NFL had one testing policy as far as days of the week versus MLS was different versus college football is a whole different thing because obviously, them being insulation athletes under different rules, we didn't have to deal with that as much as they did at the facilities, but it was just interesting to see, like you said, all of the differences between the leagues and kind of how they managed it and were able to still get their seasons in during the pandemic. Absolutely, absolutely. And so a lot of those protocols seem to still be in place as far as hand sanitizing stations, increased cleaning, the contactless guest experiences. So it sounds like a lot of those maybe are here to stay at least for a little while. Let's talk about some of the other policies you have regarding when fans are coming to the stadiums, they're prohibited from bringing certain things into the stadium, like loose batteries, bottles, laptops, inflated balls, drones, noisemakers, weapons, and additionally, only clear bags are permitted into the stadium. So when patrons come in, I understand you have a screening process called the Evolve Express Stadium Entry Technology. So it's interesting, because this technology allows patrons to come through the screening process without having to actually empty their bags. They can just carry their bags through the screening technology. So that's really interesting. So what is the purpose of continuing to have clear bags if patrons no longer have to be subject to a physical inspection of their bags? Yeah, well, first to kind of piggyback off a point from the last question, as far as the things from code mitigation that might be here to stay, right? So I think in a lot of venues, they've maybe not had the same level of cleaning techniques and the amount of staff that went through that, I think people kind of ended up realizing that maybe that wasn't as beneficial, but I think it really accelerated, like you said, the contactless guest experience of how can we take this from a pandemic situation to just something that just makes lines quicker, less weight, just a better overall experience. So a few things that we've done, obviously the involvement of touch on women, but we went completely cashless as a stadium. So we can have people, obviously it's a lot quicker from a point sale perspective if they're just using their cards versus cash, and then we also offer like the cash to card machines where they could essentially get a form of a debit card to use at consistent stands or at retail shops and then with the evolves to really a game changer that I wasn't, I didn't know all of the technology when they're bringing it on site. I was over in our same operations department, so I was more focused on supporting the logistical side of how do we power these things up? How do we make sure they work? But now that I've been over on the security side and really seen what they can do, I mean, it's a complete game changer. I know, like you said with bags and stuff, but the ability to, the throughput that you can get with them, as far as how many people per hour is so much faster than the old school kind of walkthrough metal detectors that you are used to it, a lot of sports venues and airports and stuff like that. As far as the technology and what it's zero down to, as far as clear bags, a lot of that stuff comes from NFL best practices that we have to follow as an NFL facility. So they obviously have to kind of paint a ball brush there because not every venue has switched over to the evolved type technology. There's a couple other, Che has like the open gate system, the technology that makes you able to have that faster throughput, but it's all about kind of risk mitigation, looking at obviously incidences in the past, whether it was the terrorist attack on the soccer stadium in France and I think 2017 or the 2018 Manchester bombing at the Ariana Grande concert, putting in best practices to stop those kinds of events from happening, right? So making it easy for the guests to get through with their bag would also be able to have that level of protection for prohibited items that satisfies the safety and security element as well. So kind of that balance and also being able to maintain the level of security that's necessary. You have to really be aware of what incidents are happening and other venues as well as the technology that can support deterring those incidents as well. I mean, one thing that's really common in stadiums is problems with alcohol consumption and over consumption. Absolutely. So I know you allow tailgating to happen prior to games and once in the stadium, you're trying to kind of manage and control the consumption of alcohol by reducing the amount of sales and cutting people off before games are over, but there was a video actually that was posted on Twitter in December of 2021 where a fight broke out between spectators. Now I know this isn't really something novel to your specific facility, but what do you do when you're talking about consumption of alcohol and controlling the fans and the way that they're engaging inside your facility? Yeah, I think the first big thing is just training and education. So all of our staff, whether it's event security, guest services, our bartenders are gonna go through some semblance of alcohol training, whether it's recognizing the symptoms of impairment, how to handle those situations. Obviously, each person's gonna be a little bit different. The person who's responding to altercation like you detailed is gonna have different training than the person who's working as a bartender, making sure that your staff is trained and educated on how to handle those situations. Something we do is limiting the amount of alcohol you can purchase in one transaction. In no one's allowed to purchase more than two per transaction, stuff like that, a lot of different mitigation techniques that they can use. And then unfortunately we do have the occurrences when people go too far, get into arguments that may result in physical altercations. And then it's all about responding to those altercations, limiting any kind of escalation that it might have and then dealing with those as they come along with our event security and law enforcement that we would have at the stadium. Yeah, absolutely. So they might be ejected from the game or possibly even arrested. It might be banned from the facility in future events. I thought it was really interesting that you have in conjunction with mothers, again, strength driving a pledge for people where there's prizes potentially that they can get if they pledge to come go home safely and be responsible, I guess, following the consumption of alcohol. So that was really a very creative strategy to encourage people to behave responsibly. Your stadium can hold over 70,000 spectators. I know one issue is about people getting separated from one another. This can be a concern, particularly when we're talking about missing kids or just other lost patrons. So tell us about your TAG A Kid program and other ways that you reunify lost persons. Yeah, so primarily handle that through our guest services. We have stations all around the stadium where if an occurrence like that does happen, they can go to one of the kiosks. We'll kind of put the word out among our staff and they can go that way as far as being reunited with their family member. We have CCTV cameras all around where once we can get information, we can do everything we can to reunite them. And luckily so far, that program has worked pretty well. You've mentioned other incidents that might be more extreme. You mentioned some like a terrorist incident that could happen in the stadium. So there's always these concerns. I know you have an app that fans can download to use on their phones to receive alerts and notifications. Do you actually use that app to communicate any kind of emergency situations to your patrons? Yeah, so we have a few different ways you can use. Both of our teams have an app and the stadium has an app so you can go that way. We also have an emergency management notification system in the stadium. So we can do the canned messages over the, our halo board, all of our room boards, that kind of thing. We also can use the PA system if there's anything in particular that specifically needs to be addressed the situation. So we have a variety of ways that we can keep in touch with our fans and our plans to make sure that they're safe and secure in every situation. And I thought it was pretty progressive that you actually are communicating with your fans about the possibility of the need to evacuate the facility to include a video that you've posted recording procedures on depending on where you're seated within the facility, what way you should evacuate the stadium. Do you find that patrons are actually familiarizing themselves with that information? Or is it just another tool in the toolbox? A little bit of both. I think it just, you know, it's going to tell the person some people who, you know, depending on the lot of work that they're in might be more prone to paying attention to that stuff. And you're going to have some people who are just, you know, they're to focus on the game and that's it. So I think the most important thing is, you know, stressing the importance of, you know, the old, if you see something, say something slogan, making sure that, you know, everyone kind of knows what their job is in the grand scheme of security in the building. And then making sure that, you know, all of our event security staff and guest services folks are trained in what the protocols are in the event of a emergency or an incident where, you know, we would need to evacuate that they know how to get fans out safely and securely. So there's a lot for you to think about. We've only touched on a few different things that if you could identify any particular procedures or protocols or incidents that concern you or maybe keep you up at night, what would you say that you're really trying to do to keep people safe within the Mercedes-Benz Stadium? You know, I think we have a, like I said, we try to, you know, get ahead of all our, you know, possible occurrences, try to think through scenarios. We do a really good job of, you know, probably once a quarter, we'll sit through tabletop scenarios with, you know, all the different departments around the building are, you know, law enforcement partners kind of go through different scenarios to stay ahead of things. And I think we really do a good job of that, rehearsing things, going through scenarios, talking through what everyone's role is gonna be to try and, you know, go through everything that would happen in the event of an incident or a emergency. And then just make sure, you know, it all just goes back to good training, good education. Making sure everyone knows what their role is, good communication and just try to stay ahead of everything. And, you know, we've all been around the industry for a while. We've seen kind of the, you know, the standard, like you said, could be, you know, alcohol impairment, could be, you know, fans getting in arguments, altercations, that kind of thing, to know how to deal with those and just use that experience and try to stay ahead of anything that comes up. Absolutely. I think the theme here is communication and preparation. So with all parties, Yeah, that's a bunch. Yeah, it seems like you're doing a great job of that. So thanks, Mike, for your insight into professional stadium security and making sports facilities safe. Thank you to our viewers for joining us today on the Sports Playbook. In two weeks, our guest is AJ Monette, who will discuss Tough Mudder's extreme running events. We will see you then. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. 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