Nina Simmons Quotations

We have security stationed in front of the student areas, and we're telling them, Look, guys, here's the plan. We've got to get the visiting team out of here. We know you're going to rush the floor, but here's the path that we want to take to go onto the floor. We're going to open it up to you and just funnel you down this way.

You cannot hire enough security to truly stop them. But what you can do is create a situation where you have security bringing down students. And you don't want that. You don't want the PR nightmare of somebody getting hurt. It's so much easier to try to control the chaos than it is to do that.

We also communicate with our security company. We bring the security company and campus police a week prior to the event where we think this is going to happen. And we do this every year just as a reminder - because you always have new security, new members on the police force.

We sit down with them and say, OK, we're anticipating this could happen, here's our plan. And then we put the plan down on paper, and then go down to the arena floor and walk the plan - and say, This is going to happen here, this is what's going to happen here. Anybody have ideas about how we should handle it? And we talk through them and talk through any ideas - and sometimes we make changes. We've got it down to about as good as we can do with what we have to do with.

And then we go around to anybody sitting in the end zones - particularly families with small children - and say, Look, we would really like for you to take them to the tunnels when there's about 45 seconds left on the clock and just watch the remainder of the game from there. You'd be a lot safer. Usually they're fine with that. You just need to talk to them about it and tell them why it's important.

The bottom line is that nobody has enough money to hire 40 extra police officers. And that's what it would take if you were going to try to prevent it from happening. You would just have to line the row with police officers.

There is not really a way to stop them - if they really, really want to rush the court.

The night of the event, we brief all the security, all the police who are there, and the event staff who are working, and talk to them about what's going to happen, and what everybody's responsibilities are in the event that it does happen.

You can put some procedures in place to try to prevent it - but if you're one of those schools that has that tradition, it's going to happen.

The first step is that we draw up a game plan.