LAS VEGAS - It's been 13 years, and Jerome Robinson can still honestly say the day before the first World Finals at the Thomas & Center was the most stressful of his entire career producing bull-riding events and rodeos.

Robinson, who oversees the arena crew for both the Built Ford Tough Series and World Finals as well as other events, said they underestimated the difficulty of making the transition from the MGM Grand Arena, where the first five World Finals took place beginning in 1995, to its current home at the Thomas & Mack Center.

This year will mark the 14th year the World Finals have been held on the campus of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

"I had no idea how we were going to be ready for our show, come Thursday night," recalled Robinson, who added, "The early days were interesting, to say the least."

Back then, the World Finals were held from Thursday night through Sunday afternoon, but Robinson's crew couldn't begin their load-in until nearly midnight on Tuesday - less than 48 hours beforehand - because of an NBA pre-season exhibition game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Sacramento Kings.

The dirt began being loaded in that night around 2 a.m. and 24 hours later, according to Robinson, he had his crew were still laboring away at getting the arena ready when he approached his crew. He told them, "Let's go home and come back at eight and try to knock this out."

Thursday morning, he said, everything began to fall into place.

Robinson put literally everyone to work that day. Even if they weren't part of the arena or production crew, he assigned them a task to be completed. Luckily the guys, who had been hired to handle the livestock, had experience assembling pens, which freed up Robinson to help out in other areas.

They finished just in time, but Robinson still remembers the opening night of the 1999 World Finals being the most disorganized in the 18 previous years the event has been hosted.

"Nobody could figure out why I wasn't upset," he laughed, "but I was just so happy there was something for the crowd to see because, like I say, it wasn't too many hours before it I was wondering how we were going to open it at seven o'clock that night."

That was then and this now.

Nowadays the pre-production is scheduled to take place like clockwork.

Robinson said, "We've done it so many times now we've made as many mistakes as we can."

This year, Robinson will work with a crew of eight men - Joe Hales, Clint Davis, Seth Skurja, Josh Jordan, Kevin Parlari, Tim Surivant, Charles Phillips and Josh Thames - while Ted Groene, who is normally part of the arena crew for BFTS events, will stay out at the bull housing with an additional five-man crew.

"He eats, sleeps and drinks out there," said Robinson, of Groene. "Of all the people who have a big workload, at the Finals, I don't think that anyone has a bigger one than Ted does."

Surivant and Phillips are first-timers, while Hales will take over Groene's job of running the back pens at the event. Groene is typically the livestock foreman at BFTS events throughout the 10-month long season.

According to Robinson, his crew will start at the South Point Hotel, on Thursday - six days prior to the start of the World Finals - where they will start having feed delivered and gathering material for both arenas. The World Finals takes place at the Thomas & Mack Center, while the ABBI events at right South Point.

On Saturday, the production crew, which is led by Clayton Cullen and Jim White, will start the process of loading in the video, lighting and audio portion of the production.

According to White, the World Finals will require three days of production load-in as opposed to the one-and-a-half it takes for a standard BFTS event. He said the eight semi-trailers of "hanging production" includes five times as much lighting, four times as much video and twice as much audio gear as they normally load in.

Although the production venders supply the techs to run the equipment, the PBR will hire an additional 60 workers from a local Las Vegas labor company. The production portion of a typical BFTS event requires 1,500 man-hours of setup time, while the World Finals will take up three to four times that amount.

"That's our Super Bowl," said White, who added that it takes two solid days to load out the arena, dirt and hanging production once the World Finals are over with on Sunday, Oct. 28. "Everybody puts that little extra effort in it."

Once the production crew has all the hanging elements of the World Finals up off the arena floor - lights, video and audio - the arena crew will start their process on Sunday as they prepare the arena for the arrival of 600 yards of dirt, which equates to 30 belly-loads of dirt.

According to Robinson, the footprint for the Thomas & Mack Center is one of the smaller facilities - or as he calls it, "an intimate setting" - so there isn't the added arena setup that a venue like Cowboys Stadium requires for the Iron Cowboy Invitational.

Priefert Ranch Equipment will deliver two truckloads of brand new chutes and fencing for the arena. Robinson and few of his crew members will unload the two trucks "and get the bugs out of it and get it all assembled," while the others line the arena edges with boards needed to retain the all the dirt being delivered.

"Nobody knows how much these gates weigh till they try to pack one themselves and (the arena crew) does it every week," said Mike White, who is being inducted into the Ring of Honor this year during the Heroes & Legends ceremony on Tuesday night at South Point.

"They set it up and tear it down. Sometimes they don't get into a building till midnight and they have to set it up by six a.m. the next morning. These guys work their butts off and they just don't get enough credit for what they do."

He added, "It's a lot of hard labor and I know from experience what it takes."

White has produced several Touring Pro Division events on a much smaller scale, and explained, "I don't pack panels like these guys, but I know how heavy they are and when I pack them I dread it."

Once the dirt is in place, they'll line the chutes up at each end of the arena and assemble the back pens, so the sponsorship department can begin the "problematic nightmare" of getting all the proper signage in place by the start of the rider introductions on Wednesday evening.

Robinson said another truckload of equipment - staging and props for various openings and carpeting - is stored year-round in Las Vegas.

There will be six truckloads of fencing for the bull housing, where they'll make enough pens to house 130 bulls for the World Finals, 40 ABBI Classic bulls, futurity bulls and the Back Seat Buckers, which will account for another 400 head of livestock.

Livestock will be hauled to Las Vegas from as close as California and the Pacific Northwest to as far away as North Carolina and Canada.

There are another five semi-trailers worth of supplies for the ABBI's events at the South Point and will require 15 workers and 48 man-hours to prep for the Wild Card event that will take place in the 4,600-seat venue, which is widely recognized as the finest equestrian/livestock arena in the United States.

South Point opened the venue in 2006.

"We know what days and about how long it's going to take and, as luck would have it, I have diagrams now after we've made every mistake you can make," Robinson offered. "I've got it on paper what panel we put in where."

However, he did add, "We're pretty creative at figuring out new mistakes too, but it gets easier every year."

Follow Keith Ryan Cartwright on Twitter @PBR_KRC.