For nearly 15 years, North Carolina’s athletics director, Bubba Cunningham, has been studying and thinking and considering the future of the Tar Heels’ iconic basketball arena.
Now the future of the Dean E. Smith Student Activities Center — better known as the Dean Dome — is on everyone’s mind. Tar Heels young and not-so-young have an opinion on what to do with the 40-year-old arena, leading to a very public division among those who want to build a new venue and those who prefer to renovate the current one.
Other WRAL Top Stories
And it’s led university officials to rethink the process, redo their efforts to reach important groups and rework their timeline after they, in Cunningham’s words, “dropped the ball” on communications.
“We did a really good job of taking this expert opinion and building that,” Cunningham said. “And then the next step of our process was to communicate all the things that we’ve learned and then get input from the basketball community, the students, everybody else that goes to our games, whether it’s our season-ticket holders, Rams Club members, everybody else. Quite frankly, I think that we dropped the ball. So from October of ’24 until just prior to Christmas ’25, we didn’t do that.”
Some high-profile donors and supporters that they first found out about the potential move in early December 2025, setting off a loud and sustained pushback effort that has included public videos in support of renovation from former head coach Roy Williams and former star player Tyler Hansbrough.
The Committee for a South Campus Arena created a slogan “Renovate, Don’t Relocate,” social media pages, a website, a petition signed by more than 34,000 people, the Williams and Hansbrough videos, advertisements in The Daily Tar Heel student newspaper and a Feb. 10 letter to UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts with a list of demands.
“The energy the administration and athletic department and South Building has spent on this has been on why we move,” said Rusty Carter, chairman of the committee, a former Board of Trustees member and friend of Williams. “They have not spent 10% of that energy on why we should and can stay. That is the issue here.”
Cunningham, who will move to a role as senior advisor to the chancellor and athletics director on July 1, has spent years on the issue.
In 2011, inspired by the success of the premium Blue Zone at UNC’s Kenan Stadium, he hired a firm to study all of the Tar Heels’ athletic facilities. That plan — to build a new arena in the nextdoor Bowles Lot — was scuttled by an ongoing NCAA investigation.
Then the Tar Heels started a university-wide campaign that included renovations to many of the school’s Olympic sports venues. More planning came together in 2019, only for the Covid-19 pandemic to disrupt them and everything else.
About three years ago, Cunningham and the athletics department reengaged on the Smith Center issue — how much would it cost to make necessary repairs, how much for a full renovation, how much for a new building somewhere else?
Late last year, with plans moving forward and bidding set to start to build a new campus on a parcel of university-owned land north of main campus, a decision was needed about whether the Carolina North development would include a basketball arena.
“It’s probably going to be [a] basketball arena going to Carolina North, so why don’t we go ahead and do that?” Cunningham said. “And then we started talking to more stakeholders and realized that's not a good idea. Let's pull that back. Let's do the development of Carolina North without a basketball arena. And maybe it goes there. Maybe it doesn't. So we probably got ahead of ourselves before the first of the year.”
The university’s board of trustees approved $8 million for site work and designs at Carolina North last month. The plan didn’t include a basketball arena.
The university has created two new committees — one of former basketball players and one of students — to help guide its decision. From the basketball family, Cunningham said, officials want to know what it’s going to take in an arena to be elite for the next 50 years. For many UNC students, Cunningham said, men’s basketball games are an important part of the college experience.
Roberts said the three main factors for him in the arena decision are winning, student access and proximity to the court and fan experiences.
Finances are also a huge priority.
The Tar Heels spent more than $187 million on athletics in the 2024-25 academic year, a number that is only going to rise with the department facing rising costs due to revenue sharing with athletes, increased scholarships in most sports, an emphasis on football and other costs across the board. Football and men’s basketball are the primary drivers of athletic revenue.
“There’s nothing more important to us than making sure that where we play, how we play and how we generate money to pay for what we’re trying to do is all successful,” Cunningham said.
No matter what the final decision is on what to do with the venue, the university plans to keep Smith’s name on the arena, as it has been since the building opened, and Williams’ name on the court. The playing surface was renamed Roy Williams Court in 2018.
The Smith Center doesn’t include club seats or boxes, the type of premium seating that drives additional revenue. Limited to one concourse, there is little room for enhanced food and beverage options or other amenities that are common in more modern arenas.
Few believe the current setup at the Smith Center is adequate moving forward.
There are seven options being considered and vetted, incoming athletics director Steve Newmark said. Those are: repair and maintain the Smith Center, renovate the Smith Center, rebuild the Smith Center or new arenas at the Bowles Lot, Odum Village, Friday Center or Carolina North.
Cunningham said repairing and maintaining the Smith Center would cost between $150 million and $200 million over a 20-year period with about half of that needed in the next five years. A renovation, he said, would be about $600 million and a new build would cost about $800 million. With soaring construction costs and the length of projects, those figures could rise.
“Once you start into a project, you’re going to have some fluctuation,” Cunningham said. “We’ve built some of that in.”
One of the top complaints from Carter’s committee has been that the school hasn’t shared detailed financial information comparing and contrasting between the options. Newmark said that when the school begins to cull its options, it would make more of that information public.
The administrators said they have gotten studies and reports from some of the biggest names in arena construction, including Populous and Legends. Populous conducted a study in 2024, chosen from among nine bidders, that WRAL obtained through a public records request.
Complicating the financial calculus are decisions and deals made more than 40 years ago. Donors who made significant contributions to the construction of the $34-million Smith Center earned permanent seat rights in the building — forever. Many of them still have those seats. Many, though not all, are longtime supporters and boosters of the program. Those seats present two issues: revenue and student seating.
“If you build a new arena, you’re no longer in the same arena, therefore those rights wouldn’t transfer,” said Cunningham, who added that it’s less clear what happens if the Tar Heels do as massive a renovation of the arena, especially if they change the entire configuration.
“Working through the individual financial models is something that we really have to get clarity on as we go forward.”
Carter said he’s concerned about stripping seats away from those who have supported the program for decades. He said it would be “unfair and unkind.”
“That is not the Carolina Way, and it’s not a reasonable position unless you don’t care about anything but money,” he said.
The Rams Club, he said, has been buying back legacy seats for years. In its letter to Roberts, Carter’s committee asked for “an independent and professionally led collaborative analysis of the Smith Center legacy seating repositioning options, repurchase and resale so we may establish a true revenue profile for comparison.”
If the school invests in a costly renovation or a new build, the women’s basketball team — which currently plays at Carmichael Arena — would share the new home, Cunningham said. The new site ideally would have practice facilities for both programs as well as more space for training and nutrition. The 2024 study concluded that a renovation or rebuild of the Smith Center would require the construction of a new natatorium, which is located next door to the current basketball arena.
The same study indicated a 16,000-seat arena would fit on all sites. The future arena, whether renovated or new, would likely have between 16,000 and 18,000 seats, Cunningham said. The current Smith Center holds more than 21,000 fans.
If the Smith Center were to undergo an extensive renovation, the Tar Heels may have to play elsewhere for a season or longer — likely a huge recruiting negative in an era of frequent player movement and one-and-dones – or play with a reduced capacity at the Smith Center or add more costs for a staged renovation. Carter said the renovation could be done in phases, so as not to disrupt the team’s schedule or the history, tradition and homecourt advantage of the Smith Center.
He said: “Reestablishing that in some new arena off campus is very much an unknown.”
