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People and Pop Culture

Plugged In: Bill Senn, Miami Dolphins

A 35-year veteran of the construction industry, Bill Senn has carved a niche managing the development of NFL and NBA facilities. Since November 2014, he’s been senior vice president of stadium renovations for the Miami Dolphins, in charge of the $450 million renovation of Sun Life Stadium. The project is due to be completed prior to the Dolphins’ 2017 season and includes among its features installation of a shade canopy over the venue’s seating bowl.

Once you’ve operated a facility, you know how things go from feast to famine in the building … and really understand the differences between how that building needs to function on a dark day versus an event day.


Photo by: MIAMI DOLPHINS
Erecting the canopy: We’ve got a significant assembly line going on in the west parking lot with about 5,000 tons of steel. With a 700,000-square-foot shade canopy, we have some massive cranes. Some weigh 900 tons, and it will take 11 cranes to assemble the canopy. We’re using self-propelled mobile transporters to bring these large sections of trusses over to the site so we can then lift them up onto the building. It’s a cable structure that sits on eight super columns, two in each corner of the building. It’s kind of like an eight-legged table.

Working between stadium events in 2015: Our home games [were] stacked in the back half of the season [with four home games in December and January]. It’s helped us immensely with the [seating bowl] renovation we did this past offseason to try and clean up punch-list items. We’ve been doing things behind the scenes. We started off early with 300 to 400 workers on site between games and are down to 150 right now cleaning things up.

His ties to sports developer Jay Cross: I’ve had the good fortune of being affiliated with Jay my entire career. He’s been a great mentor for me, going through the different projects.

Lessons learned: One of the greatest experiences for me was at AmericanAirlines Arena. I had the good fortune of being involved with the development of that facility. Shortly after we opened, Jay, as president of the Miami Heat, asked me to take over as general manager to run the building. I did that for roughly 3 1/2 years. There’s a whole litany of things you learn from the operations side that I now bring forward in my work.

— Don Muret

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