SCHEELS Sports Park GM planning for the future

SCHEELS Sports Park General Manager Brandon Doherty said it will take time for the facility to bring the economic infusion to the area that has been promoted. The site, with numerous sports fields and what is billed as the world’s largest air-supported dome, sits on the south end of Springfield off MacArthur Blvd. near I-72.

The multi-use layouts allow the park to be utilized as:

*6 NCAA regulation baseball fields
*15 outdoor softball/younger age baseball, 2 indoor softball/younger age baseball
*8 NCAA regulation soccer/lacrosse fields (or 16 youth soccer fields), 1 indoor rectangular field
*Indoor Dome that is 196,000+ square feet-, 6 basketball courts, 12 volleyball courts (permanent), additional flooring can be placed over the turf fields to increase the number of courts or floor space.
* Total volleyball with additional courts- 28
*Total basketball with additional courts- 14

Doherty said the first year has seen a lot of success and he expects interest to grow. The sports park is looking to take advantage of the growing sports tourism industry.

NPR Illinois’ Sean Crawford talked with Doherty about how things are going and what he sees for the future.

(Edited transcript of interview)

SC: it’s been open now for how many months?

BD: Well, we’ve been kind of in a phase-to-open approach throughout the whole year, but I would say fully open with everything running probably by, I would say, July of this year.

SC: And you came to Springfield from Starkville, Mississippi. That’s where you’d worked in a similar operation down there.

BD: Yep, absolutely. I’ve been working on putting ballparks together and operating them for about 20 years and Starkville built an outdoor complex and we revamped their park and rec department.

SC: So, you’ve seen these in other places. How does the one in Springfield compare?

BD: I mean, the one here at SCHEELS is absolutely beautiful. The complex is large. It has a lot of acreage to it. The dome is original. There is no other place that I’ve been to that has a dome built the way we do. And it’s noted as the world’s largest. air structure in that capacity is absolutely amazing.

The outdoor fields are really great. all artificial turf, lots of sidewalks. It’s amazing to me that when you have so many people on site, that it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of people there. I think that’s the biggest difference that I’ve noticed with. other parks is a lot of those areas and spaces are really condensed down, so you tend to be on top of people. But here, you look around and you’re like, man, there’s really nobody here, and there’s 1,500 people around the park.

SC: Explain how it all works, because I’m sure some people have seen the dome if they’ve driven by, and it is near the SCHEELS sports store on the south end of Springfield. But there’s a lot more to it. And as you mentioned, you’ve got a lot of people coming in using different facilities that are there. Tell us about some of the facilities and also how do you schedule all of that to make sure it can function?

BD: The facility, we have everything from basketball to volleyball to we have some rental rooms. We have the ability to do tournaments or catering type events or banquets. The beauty of the dome is it’s basically what we refer to as kind of like a multipurpose space. If you can think of something that you’d want to do, chances are we have the capacity to do that inside the dome and really outside also.

You know, you ask about how do you schedule? Well, it starts with really great staff, you know, and being organized. I’ve got a really great team that does that. Basically, what we do is we look at people come in and they ask questions about, hey, I’d like to either run an event or do a tournament. We provide a tour. We ask them a number of questions. Then from there, we basically rent them the facility through a contract.

And then from there, we execute. We work with them in helping them find local vendors or hotels. But it ultimately is their event that they run. Now there’s times where we do those things internally. We will run our own events, but right now we’ve been focused on outside people coming in and basically renting that space.

SC: When it was first talked about in theory, the idea was to attract people to the community, sports tourism, as it’s called. This is a big industry, I guess it is still a growing industry.

BD: Yeah, this sports tourism is a billion dollar, and I did say billion dollar industry of people coming to your community and utilizing the different things. in Springfield, this is a newer concept. It has had some different activities throughout the years, but this is really the big focus in sports tourism. And just like anything that’s new getting up off the ground, it takes a little bit of time to get some momentum. Working with Visit Springfield and Scott Dahl, and his team and Terry and all them has been really great to help kind of like thrust us forward in that world.

But to get into that world to the capacity that we want to get into, which is huge events, large national activities, people driving and flying from states away, it does take a little bit of time. And I think that sometimes we’re so anxious on getting things to a point where, hey, we’re going to be at the top of the top before we have to do the work to get there.

Right now we’re doing all that work. I think we’re going to be able to be a major player in the next three to four years. It is a process. It is new. But what’s exciting is that Springfield has done such a great job and the owners of looking forward with a vision of saying this is important for this community. Let’s do the little things right and they haven’t cut corners.

SC: We’re talking with Brandon Doherty. He’s the general manager of SCHEELS Sports Park in Springfield. You’re listening to Local Edition. You did touch on this timeline of trying to get things up and running the way you want. There have been some criticisms that bookings aren’t where they were expected to be at this point. Can you address that? And where do things stand right now? Are you satisfied with where you are this early in the process?

BD: We started booking last year, last July before the dome was really kind of getting up. And in sports tourism, there are cycles of teams that operate and they book months and months and months in advance.

So a lot of teams in August will transition because of school. Kids age up into different groups. And so we tried to get a lot of these tournaments contracted before that August time frame. anything that gets booked after that August time frame, a lot of the major organizations already had pre-existing tournaments or events.

And so we had to go through a process of kind of vetting and getting a number of organizations that were willing to take a chance on us. And we did a good job of getting a lot of contracts in place.

But just like anything else, the contract and the utilization really depends on the amount of people that sign up for these events. And because these events are ran by third party organizations or rights holders, as we call them, we don’t control the registration. And a lot of these events that we did contract with in that July to November time frame were posted. But unfortunately, because the way the system works in sports tourism and travel ball, a lot of those organizations already had schedules established.

And so we did have a hard time filling some of our tournaments. And so yeah, we had some disappointments. We had a lot of weekends booked out, contracted out, but unfortunately, when the registration numbers aren’t as high as they need to be for those tournaments to be facilitated. They’ll either cancel the tournaments or move them to other places. I will tell you that everybody that had a contract with us fulfilled their minimal obligations as we moved out. But we took a different approach this year.

We took a more of approach of diversifying the number of teams that we have contracted for this upcoming season.

So, we have contracted events in the dome starting in November through basically March again. And then outside, we really diversified into a number of different rights holders. Almost 30 different rights holders will be on our site. So that way, if we have one or two that potentially don’t perform, it doesn’t impact the complex as a whole or the community.

SC: So, you’re booking, I mean, I’m guessing booking could be going on three years out from now. Is that possible?

BD: Yeah, absolutely. So we try to book out multiple-year deals based upon performance. A great example of us booking multiple years out, we have with Visit Springfield, they work directly in that huge national market. And so we will bid, right now I think we have 12 bids out there for national level activities that will come to Springfield, but generally they’re two to three years away.

Like for instance, last year we won the bid of the World Horseshoe Championships. And so next year in July, we will hold the World Horseshoe Championships from people all over the world will fly into Springfield for two weeks and compete.

SC: This is not just facilities for out-of-towners. There are local area schools who are benefiting from these as well and playing there. Can you walk us through some of that?

BD: Oh yeah, (District) 186 is a major supporter. We have dedicated time and resources applied to that where they can come in and utilize the complex. We reach out to a number of schools, public and private, in the surrounding areas where they’ve come in and utilized the complex. It isn’t just, hey, tournaments and events. It is a lot of local usage too. The sports park as a whole is still pretty young.

We are still growing and we’ve seen in the last three months more growth with the local utilization, which is that part of Monday through Friday, than we had in the previous 10 months. This is truly just a comprehensive community project.

SC: Now, when this again first came up, I thought, well, this seems like a novel idea. I knew some of these existed, but I have seen more projects in the Midwest, in Illinois, start to be developed, if not come online. Is there more competition now for a place like the SCHEELS Sports Park?

BD: When you talk about an industry that is billions of dollars, I think there is always going to be a lot of competition. And then for us in Springfield, there’s always going to be competition with the next new complex or the next new program. And where we leverage our relationships with sports facilities by being relative and then having great customer service in our complex, we have a clean complex, we try to always stay one step ahead.

A lot of these other complexes are not built to the same scale. There will be smaller activities or smaller events at these other complexes, but based on our size, we can do larger events. And so, there’s always competition. Competition is great. It makes us stay on top of our game. As these facilities go up, it’s going to be how do we manage it better than the others.

SC: This park is a public-private development. It was funded by some private investors and also a portion of the city of Springfield’s local hotel-motel tax and sales tax in that area. I know you’re biased on this, but is this a good deal for taxpayers and those investors?

BD: I think so. Try not to get into the politics of different things, but at the end of the day, if you take a look at what Springfield had, which was a need, there was a need for space for people to be able to come in and utilize practice facilities or provide activities to the city of Springfield. And this was a way that they could provide those types of services to the community and still drive the economic impact of sports tourism.

I think anytime that we can provide a safe space, and that’s something we take pride in, safe spaces where people can come and have something to be proud of. And it doesn’t matter what your background is or age or ethnicity, it’s a safe place to come and participate.

SC: That’s Brandon Doherty, general manager of SCHEELS Sports Park in Springfield. He spoke with us here on Local Edition. Brandon, thanks once again.

BD: Thank you.