Savage Arena has been home to University of Toledo Rocket basketball for decades—a building with real atmosphere and a fanbase that fills it. But the videoboard hanging at center court had been up there for 16 years, one of the oldest in the Mid-American Conference. Toledo deserved better than that. So did the fans sitting in the upper deck trying to read a score.
We came in and replaced the whole thing. The centerpiece is a new center-hung display with custom rounded edges—four 21'4" x 11'6" faces totaling 980 square feet of 5.9mm LED. It's the largest center-hung board in the MAC, and it shows. But we weren't just swapping out a videoboard. This was a full arena LED upgrade: 160 feet of 5.9mm ribbonboards running the perimeter and 3.9mm stanchion displays at each basket. In total, the system spans 1,649.9 square feet and 4,300,512 pixels—nearly 8.5 times more pixels than what they had before.
The result is a completely transformed game-day environment. Whether you're in the front row or the top of the upper deck, you're seeing sharp, bright content on every surface in the building. That's the goal with a full-arena approach: no dead zones, no display that feels like an afterthought.
An arena ceiling has structure—rigging points, catwalk geometry, HVAC, lighting. You can't just hang whatever you want wherever you want it. The custom rounded-edge design on the Savage Arena center hung wasn't just an aesthetic choice; it was an engineering conversation about how to put the largest board in the MAC into a building that wasn't designed with today's LED in mind.
We built the center-hung unit with radiused corners to reduce visual mass from the seating bowl and work within the constraints of the existing rigging infrastructure. Four panels face the four sides of the arena, each running at 5.9mm pitch—close enough for a mid-distance crowd to read stats and replays with genuine clarity, but optimized for the viewing distances you actually find in an arena like this.
The Result: A center-hung display that feels purpose-built for Savage Arena, not crammed into it—and the largest videoboard in the Mid-American Conference.
Not every display in an arena is the same distance from the viewer. The center hung is 50+ feet up. Stanchion displays are six feet away from the first row. Running the same pixel pitch across both doesn't make sense—you'd either be over-specced on the big board or pixelated on the stanchions.
We specified 5.9mm pitch for the center-hung and ribbonboards—the right balance of resolution and viewing distance for each of those positions. For the basket stanchions, where fans are close enough to read individual pixels if you get it wrong, we stepped down to 3.9mm. That's tighter, sharper, and purpose-matched to how far away people actually are from those screens.
The Result: Every display in the building is optimized for its specific viewing context—nothing is blurry up close, nothing is wasted at distance. 4,300,512 total pixels, deployed intelligently.
A lot of arena renovations stop at the center hung. Swap the board, call it done. The problem with that approach is it leaves money and experience on the floor—literally. Ribbon displays, stanchions, and sideline tables are where sponsors live during a game. They're what cameras catch on broadcast. They're the visual layer that separates a renovated arena from a modern one.
Toledo's athletic department understood this. The brief wasn't just "replace the old board." It was a full LED infrastructure upgrade, and we designed it that way from the start—a unified system with consistent color calibration, a shared content management infrastructure, and displays that work together as a network rather than a collection of independent screens.
The Result: A cohesive, multi-surface LED environment across 1,649.9 square feet that serves athletes, fans, broadcasters, and sponsors on every game day—and for the 50+ university and community events Savage Arena hosts each year.
