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Cintas Center
For many years Xavier played in the Cincinnati Gardens, an old neighborhood arena that served the team well.
But by the time its last season rolled around, it was unquestionably outdated. Xavier's new home was to be state of the art,
upstaging the Shoemaker Center at rival Cincinnati.
The Cintas Center is the largest building on Xavier's small campus, and at a school without football it
is the hub for XU's sports program. It also hosts alumni banquets and its parking lots make up most of the parking on XU's
campus. Xavier now has a home of its own, on its own campus, and it sells out and provides a great home field advantage.
Inside the Cintas Center is light and clean-looking. It has a horseshoe-shaped seating structure split into
two levels by luxury suites. There is only one concourse for the entire arena, creating some traffic jams after games, but
the upper deck is probably not large enough to warrant a concourse of its own. In fact, it is unusual that an arena seating
just 10,000 would have two decks, and that the two decks would continue all the way around one end of the court.
If Xavier's goal was to out-build its rival arena across town, it may have succeeded. The Cintas Center
is a beautiful facility, and combines both enough luxury for a small school and an atmosphere that can be both comfortable
and deafening at times. The small end of the arena is reserved as the student section, and its seating is of about the right
number for Xavier's students.
Views in the main bowl are generally good. Because it is a horseshoe there is a large number of seats in
the corner or on the end of the court, but because of the limited size of the arena, this is not a big problem.
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