Built on Trust: The Story Behind the Payson Dome
Walk into the dome gym at Payson High School and the first thing you'll notice is the scale — soaring shotcrete walls, natural light pouring in, the unmistakable energy of a space built to inspire. What you won't notice — what you're not supposed to notice — is the silence. No disorienting echoes. No shouting over chaos. Just clean, controlled sound that makes it easier to coach, play, and celebrate.
That silence was no accident.
A sonic challenge in concrete and steel
Domes are architectural marvels — and acoustic nightmares. Curved, reflective surfaces trap and bounce sound in every direction, and in a space like this the reverberation measured more than seven seconds. A basketball scrimmage becomes a muddled roar. A referee's whistle never quite ends.
The goal: bring reverberation under two seconds. The design: 540 fabric-wrapped baffles — over six tons of treatment and steel, all told — suspended across the ceiling in a custom ring layout I engineered specifically for this dome. There was no off-the-shelf system for a monolithic shotcrete shell, so we built one.
The only way to hang that much treatment safely from a concrete dome was with a structural engineer who could translate vision into precision. For me, that meant one call — to Dmitry Ozeryansky, principal at Ozer Engineering, and my best friend since childhood.
Engineering that makes the impossible routine
Dmitry doesn't do flashy. He does accurate. Suspending acoustic treatment from a shotcrete dome isn't standard practice: the loads are eccentric, the anchoring is critical, and the consequences of failure are unacceptable. His structural design carried redundancy at every level, and we verified the anchoring on site with live load tests before a single baffle went up.
Each of the three ring sets carries more than 4,000 pounds — 12,360 pounds hanging overhead in total. When one pin came loose mid-install, the system held, the risk was contained, and the project kept moving. That moment wasn't just a structural test — it was proof the design had the margin it claimed.
Twelve days, measured honestly
We didn't just install and declare victory. We ran impulse-response tests at 33%, at 50%, and at completion — measuring the room's improvement as the rings filled in, on camera. The finished numbers: 540 baffles, reverberation from 7.4 seconds to about 2, delivered ahead of schedule.
What it actually took
More than the technical stats, this project taught me something deeper. When you do the work — day after day, year after year — to build trust, strengthen a team, and remove friction from execution, you end up with results like this. Safe. Fast. Beautiful. Not because they're easy, but because you're finally ready.
And sometimes, if you're lucky, you get to do it with your best friend from childhood.
The Payson Dome now stands as a high-performance facility and a tribute to what's possible when relationships, craftsmanship, and strategy align. It's a structure built to last — and a story built on trust.
Bradley Lewis · Mechanical engineer · Designer of the Dome Acoustics system