Around 9:30 on a Sunday night, the day’s third and final performance of “Disney on Ice: Princess Wishes” concluded at The Palace.

At 10 the next morning, the Golden State Warriors stepped on to a basketball court to prepare for their game that night against the Pistons.

Two events. One on ice, another on NBA-approved, maple-oak hardwood. Twelve hours to turn one into the other.

This is the challenge that The Palace conversions crew faces nearly 35 times during the 41-home game NBA season. The details vary; sometimes it’s dirt from the rodeo or hundreds of seats from a concert, but the objective is the same. Get the old show out, and get The Palace looking like the home of Deee-troit Basketball again: the Pistons court, the basketball rims and shot clock, the scorer’s table and the plush front-row seats.

The objective never changes. It also never gets easier. The conversion process is like sausage. No one wants to see how it gets done. It involves heavy lifting and loud noises at pitch-black hours, when 8-year-old girls in their Disney princess pajamas and Pistons players alike are soundly asleep. It involves forklifts and long carts on wheels stacked with pieces of portable stages and chairs. Lots and lots of chairs.

And on this particular Monday morning, it involved me.

“You’re going to work with Ray,” said Ken Sanders, one of the conversions crew foremen, as he supervised the Disney on Ice stage dismantling around midnight. “He’s got a crew of 20 guys coming in, working from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. Two hundred (man) hours just to get ready for the Pistons.”

Make that 204.

“One of our hardest days”

I arrive at The Palace at 5:45 a.m. and walk past a small mountain of jagged ice in the loading dock. The night before this ice coated the arena floor. Sanders’ crew spent the 12-6 a.m. shift hauling out the Princess on Ice staging, lighting, speakers and other equipment to the loading dock, then removing the ice. (I would tell you more about how they get the ice in and out of the Palace, but that’s another story – and work shift – entirely unto itself.)

I report to Mike Roche (like “roach”), the only director of conversions that The Palace has ever had. He started in 1988 with a nine-man crew. Now he has up to 100 full-time and part-time workers in a single shift, though that’s for incredibly tight turnarounds, like when The Palace hosted the Arena Football League’s Detroit Fury or the IHL’s Detroit Vipers in the afternoon and the Pistons less than three hours later.

Roche has worked out his staffing to an exact science. “We know what it takes,” he said, “so we just get the number (of workers) to get it done.”

Mike and I enter the arena floor through the Pistons’ tunnel, which is really just a set of double doors at the moment. Section 107 serves as the inside wall of the tunnel. That’s where kids hang over the side for autographs and high fives. Only it’s not there because I haven’t helped build it yet.

Instead there’s an open garage door that allows forklifts to move between the loading dock and the floor, transporting palettes of heavy objects that I will be unloading and assembling for the next three-plus hours.

A couple of ice chunks are melting on the floor. There’s nothing else out there. The Palace feels odd and hollow, like an empty apartment after somebody moves out. It looks wrong without stuff in it.

Mike passes me along to one of his most-tenured supervisors, Gary Halvarson, who puts me to work pulling out the front rows of section 125 like they were high school bleachers. All the front rows were pushed in to make room for the ice. Usually there’s a motor that does this automatically, but “it only works whenever we don’t need it to,” said Gary, who has been working conversions since 1989. It takes 10 of us to yank the three rows out and flip the seats up.

Pulling out the front rows is just one of the tasks that makes ice-to-court conversions more time-consuming than other non-Pistons events at The Palace. “We only do it three to four times a year, but it always seems like we’ve got a game the next day,” Gary said. “Concerts are easy because the floor is already down. This is one of our hardest days.”

Putting down the court

The loading dock is the primary access point to the bowels of the arena, but there’s a second, hidden passage that makes it easier to move material to and from the far end of the floor. The front of section 126 is a singular metal structure that, when removed, reveals another tunnel. That’s where the scorer’s table came from. This is the first thing rolled onto the floor because it provides the border to place the court against. The court will be built from that point out.

Near the loading dock, the hardwood court is rolled out on 13 alphabetized palettes. Each palette has 18 numerated wooden slabs. One palette’s worth of hardwood reaches from one end of the court to the other, so you can envision the court divided into a 234-piece jigsaw puzzle – piece A1 is at the corner of the visitor's bench, A2 is next but closer to the scorer's table, and so on.

The court is laid down in teams. Four men work one palette and place all 18 pieces. Each worker grabs a corner and places it carefully on the floor. Each part of the court has a bolt at the top, which hooks into a ring at the bottom of the adjoining piece.

Three of us hold our corner of the wooden slab slightly off the ground, at a 45-degree angle so that it can be hooked properly. When the fourth worker gives the OK, we lower it to the ground and swing the wood flush against the row next to it. The surface is smooth, but it's 3 to 4 inches thick, and the boards jut out underneath. Those jagged edges interlock, so when it's slid into place it feels like puzzle pieces fitting snuggly together. The visual effect, as you know, is seamless. The court looks like it never left.

Occasionally you’d run into a stubborn piece that doesn't fall in line, and that's when you call for Willie. Willie is the hammer guy, and he'll give it a good whack to keep everything in place. He actually hits a black block to protect the court. "You don't want to hit the court, but it happens," said Roche, who added only the crew veterans handle the hammer. When asked what happens if the court meets the hammer, Roche said, "It's called ‘fix-it-now.’"

Putting down the court can be a quick process with enough manpower. One team can lay down Row A while another does Row B alongside it simultaneously. With 14 people, Roche said, you can set the court down in as quickly as 45 minutes. (I imagine that’s what must have happened at The Staples Center on Sunday. The Clippers hosted the Pistons in the afternoon, and then the Lakers played Sunday night. Both LA teams played on their “home” courts.)

But on this morning, we can only put down a couple of rows before we're told to stop and “build the South side,” section 107.

Multitasking

The metal frame of section 107 looks kind of wobbly, but it’s sturdy enough to hold heavy 7-foot-long panels that are stacked on top of each other like steps. These panels, mind you, are the floor that people walk on and throw garbage on. Cola stains trap dirt and bits of popcorn. I’m glad I brought gloves. It takes two people, one at each end, to carry a panel off the stack and onto the frame. You build up, stepping on the fastened panels to reach the top.

Within 30 minutes, the garage door to the loading dock has disappeared behind a wall of black floor panels. Once all the flooring is secured, it’s time to “chair” the 400-seat section. Take two folding chairs, place them on the top row, come back to the cart, place two more chairs, and repeat – this time leave space for the aisle – and repeat again. The crew moves quickly to get the first 300 chairs up.

Multitasking is a must on the conversions crew. The 20-man crew has splintered into groups to work on several fronts. Some guys, like me, continue to “chair” the remainder of section 107. Others work to finish laying down the court, and the last piece falls into place at 7:45 a.m., a little more than an hour after we started.

When the court is complete, long carts loaded with the fancy padded courtside seats that Kid Rock sits in are rolled out. We have to line the court with those on three sides. Then I help put down the risers, the small platforms just a few inches off the ground, upon which the second and third row seats rest, just behind those cushioned seats. Then I start placing folding chairs there, too.

To take a break from chairs, I fold out the tables for VIPs, media and scoring crew members that sit behind the scorer’s table, while I watch two workers on the court inspect the basketball hoops to make sure they’re not crooked and positioned exactly 10-feet high.

Then I go back to chairing.

“People are going to walk in here tonight”

By 9:15 a.m., the last section of staging is put into place and chaired off. Two groups are chairing the final platforms, one on the sideline and another on the baseline. The crew tries to finish at the corner by the visitors’ tunnel, so any leftover chairs or equipment can be carted easily behind the scenes, out of public view. And with that, the floor is ready for the shootaround, 45 minutes ahead of schedule.

Barely halfway through the shift, I can call it a day. But the rest of the crew is just getting started. They convert the entire Palace, not just the arena floor, so they’ll spend the next four hours changing over the dressing rooms, the media room and other backstage areas that will be used on game day.

On slower days when they don’t have the change the floor, they’ll get ahead where they can to prepare for the next non-Pistons event, converting areas of The Palace not used for NBA games. There’s always something to be done, and most of it will happen at night, when it won’t interrupt the visiting public. Roche said they don’t have day shifts; you’re there either very early in the morning or very late at night.

“Sometimes we work all three shifts in one week,” Gary said. “You don’t ever sleep.”

In less than four hours, we turned an empty floor into an NBA basketball court complete with press row, team benches and the first three rows of courtside seats. We built section 107 from the ground up and returned section 126 back where it belonged.

“People are going to walk in here tonight and think it’s like this all the time,” a worker named William said to me as we’re placing the platforms along the sideline.

William’s right, which should tell you how good these guys are at their job.

They don’t make it look easy. They make it look like it’s no work at all.