Greensboro a Fantastic Hornets Pre-Season Host

  As a lot of you have been reading, I have been reminiscing about my trip last fall to Nashville/Tennessee/North Carolina.  Part of that trip included a trip to a Charlotte Hornets pre-season game against the Boston Celtics in Greensboro.  For anyone around the area, you know what the Greensboro Coliseum is.  For those that don't know where Greensboro is or what the Greensboro Coliseum is, it's more or less about east central in terms of location in NC and Greensboro Coliseum is where they typically played the ACC Tournament until the location changed to more of the mid-atlantic states and cities.  So with that, this may be a bit of a shorter blog post, but I will talk about the Coliseum, it's amenities and what I thought of the product on the floor.
  So as I said about the Coliseum, it is actually is quite massive.  It is slated to host about 20,000 or so, and mainly that was the attendance for the ACC tournament with so many NC schools in and around the area and different concerts.  They curtained off a lot of the upper deck seats this time in round as a pre-season game would not get the 20,000 seats filled.  However that didn't stop Greensboro or Charlotte fans from turning out to watch the Hornets on this night.  If I were a guessing guy, there was a good 8 to 9 thousand fans there to watch them play Boston.  You could feel some of the history of the arena from the NCAA tourney games of past and the ACC tournament games of past lore in this arena as you went through the corridors.  The way up the arena is there are stairs to go upstairs to go to your seats and concessions.  It's a bit of an odd twist from other arenas, but it isn't a knock at all and allows fans to evenly get into the arena and through the corridors with ease.  For the Coliseum, the seats are nice and easy to get to, as the sections are clearly labeled as well as the seats are.  Overall it has everything that puts people at ease and is handicap accessible.  So what about the amenities?

Greensboro Coliseum

  Really it is the basics at Greensboro Coliseum when I went.  There were not a lot of specialty items, but you got your basic arena foods, which I had chicken and fries.  I thought they were good and can never go wrong with Dippin Dots.  It had a kiosk or pop-up fan store for the Hornets, which I gladly got a Hornets hat as I typically get a team or event hat.  I thought the food and the merchandise was affordable in price, so was the ticket for pre-season.  Overall I thought the presentation was good.  I thought the food was good and the merchandise selection was also good, albeit limited.  The only down side I think was a few more concessions probably could have been open but this was likely a surprise that there were quite as many people at the game.  I was surprised that there were as many as I saw, because I thought with pre-season it would be a sparse crowd before the season started.  Anyway, the next thing would be what about the product on the court?
  Well the product was fine for pre-season.  You saw some starters get time, like Kemba Walker, Jae Crowder, Frank Kaminsky, and so on.  Obviously the key things for teams are to be healthy with their starting and key role players and fill out their roster after that.  In the end, Boston won the game, but it was all about health and production of the role guys in this game.  I left shortly after halftime, having seen enough of the game with the starters to go with.  But all in all I thought the product was really fine on the court.
  With that, I said goodbye to Greensboro.  While I had a short visit I thought it was a good time.  I thought the Greensboro Coliseum was a nice arena and they should be proud of themselves.  I also enjoyed the product the Celtics and Hornets put on the floor on this night, especially being early on the pre-season.  All in all, a trip well worth it.