Courtesy of Integrated Architecture
We wrote about various large-scale entertainment and retail venues being repurposed for youth sports facilities back in August — think abandoned malls and bowling alleys, empty office parks, even an old junkyard.
The trend continues: Officials in Lane County, Oregon, are considering converting a massive call center formerly used by Royal Caribbean Cruises into a multi-sport complex with at least eight basketball courts/16 volleyball courts.
The 160K-square-foot facility sits off Interstate 5 just north of Eugene and about two hours south of Portland; it is close to a cluster of hotels and dining/retail locations. Officials believe it would drive sports tourism and are looking for it to hold at least 4K spectators for tournaments.
8 Basketball Courts, 16 Volleyball Courts could be the name of a biting Green Day song about the proliferation of similarly-sized venues across the country.
I heard an interesting alt take from a respected youth sports thought leader last week. I’m not sure I agree with it, but here it goes: Perhaps the youth sports travel market decreases through some combination of family pushback on travel costs and more venues closer to home (supply matching demand).
The Sports Facilities Companies says “almost everything is a P3 [public-private partnership] in some way, shape or form,” and at the Jefferies event last month, they framed it as roughly half of feasibility studies they do are for private investors, but ~80% of the projects that get greenlit include public funding.
That tells me the math doesn’t work so well without a municipality also benefitting from tourism spend— something that private investors can tap into through incentives and rebates.
Paradoxically, enough of these things get built and you reduce the demand - especially in regions where travel is mandatory to seek competition - because someone now has a tournament option closer to home. At which point: Is there a scalable framework to deploy $60M-$70M in infrastructure improvements to existing fields and facilities, say, across an entire state rather than a single location? It probably would serve parents and athletes more - they spend most of their time at local venues after all - but the ROI is almost certainly less clear without the localized tourism and development elements.
Cracking the business end of that nut would be viewed as a huge win by families, local operators, and tax payers as a whole.
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