The (Basket) Ballroom : Avalon High’s Lancers Bring a New Bounce to Dance Floor

When the elegant Casino Ballroom was built on Santa Catalina Island in 1929, no one ever dreamed the name would be taken literally.

Not until last September, when Avalon High School’s Lancers basketball team found itself with no place to play.

That’s when the ballroom became the ball room.

Beginning tonight, the Avalon Lancers boys and girls teams will play all their home games this season beneath the chandelier of the Art Deco Casino’s ballroom. The school’s regular gym has been shut down while asbestos is being removed.

The bounce of basketballs, the screech of tennis shoes and the cheers of the home crowd will echo across the hardwood maple floor where, in the 1940s and 1950s, couples in tuxedos and gowns swayed to the big-band music of Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton.

When the Lancers take the court, it will mark one of the most unusual uses of the ballroom since Gene Autry’s horse Champion took the Casino stage in the late 1940s.

“This will be the definite season to remember,” said forward Roberto Tejeda, 16. “We’ll be the first team to ever play there. The fans are more excited than we are.”

The ballroom’s atmosphere of sports-in-the-round is “like being inside of an arena, and no one else has a view like that,” said boys’ teams Coach Dave Lassiter.

Housed in the round, columned Casino building just north of Avalon, the ballroom has a panoramic ocean view, an elegantly appointed interior and a hardwood dance floor surrounded by tables and chairs--some on steps for a better view of the dance floor and stage.

Transforming the dance floor into a temporary basketball court was a long shot from the beginning, said Ron Doutt, a spokesman for the Santa Catalina Island Co., which owns the Casino. He was approached by Avalon Principal Jon Meyer with the unusual request.

Some of the problems were obvious, Doutt said.

“We’ve got a beautiful chandelier,” Doutt said. “How do you protect it from someone throwing a length-of-court ball or, in his exuberance at the end of a game, throwing the ball up in the air? And does a basketball bounce true on a floor made for dancing? How do tennis shoes work on a floor made for dancing?”

But Meyer, Doutt and the Island Co. President Paxson Offield tackled the problems, working with casino operations director Billy Delbert and Ron Tessada, maintenance director for the Long Beach Unified School District. Avalon schools are part of the Long Beach system.

To brighten the “subdued” dance floor lighting, theatrical lights were suspended from a ceiling truss that surrounds and protects the chandelier, Doutt said. Adhesive tape was used to mark the court parameters instead of paint. A portable scoreboard will be used.

The result, said player Tejeda, is “pretty good. We need a little bit more lighting. Other than that it’s just like playing in the gym.”

Then the goal became installing the baskets.

Two professional-quality movable basketball goals, each weighing 3,200 pounds and costing $8,000, were ordered from a firm in Seattle. While being shipped from the Northwest, however, the backboards were shattered in a freeway accident.

A second pair of goals made it as far as San Pedro before they, too, were shattered, this time in a dockside mishap. Finally, a third pair made it all the way to Avalon, arriving a week after practices were scheduled to start.

The school paid for the new goals, and the Island Co. is picking up the remainder of the costs, said Doutt, who declined to specify the amount. There is no charge to the school for use of the building, he said.

The 460 students in Avalon’s four schools still miss their old gym--a free-standing building that normally is used for physical education classes, assemblies, concerts and graduations, Meyer said.

Since the gym’s closing at the beginning of the school year, assemblies have been held in the 185-person auditorium or outside on the baseball field, Meyer said. To the students’ dismay, traditional Friday night dances for high school students have been canceled indefinitely, Meyer said.

Avalon students are also upset because clearing all the asbestos from the gym “may be a technical impossibility,” Meyer said. “There’s a tradition associated with our gym, so there’s some agony over the prospect of losing it.”

More than $200,000 has been spent to clear asbestos from the gym, but some of the cancer-causing substance remains, “a heck of a lot in the ceiling, the pillars, and behind the walls,” Tessada said.

Clearing the asbestos is difficult because of the age of the building, which dates from the 1920s, and the large amount used in construction, Tessada said.

The gym will remain shut until enough asbestos is removed to lower airborne levels to one fiber per cubic centimeter or less, as required by federal law, Tessada said.

If the district is unable to bring the levels down to federal standards, the gym may have to be torn down and a new one built, officials said.

In the meantime, the Island Co. has rescued this season, Lassiter said, saving the basketball teams from having to play all their games “over town”--on the mainland.

The goals and truss lighting will be removed from the ballroom for the town’s traditional gala Christmas and New Year’s Eve parties, Doutt said.

And at the end of the basketball season in February, school and Casino officials will throw “an old-fashioned sock hop” for the whole town to celebrate the spirit of cooperation, Doutt said.