Austin American-Statesman

Families flock to youth sports sites

Megacomple­xes in small towns draw kids, parents — and their cash.

- Joe Drape

EMERSON, GA. — Just past the Hampton Inn and the Chick-fil-A, beyond the climbing wall but not as far as the water park, is your field of dreams. Actually, there are eight of them: all major leaguesize­d, synthetic-turfed and LED-lit, and wedged in next to the three soccer pitches. The Champions Center is ahead on your left, where a dozen basketball courts can be converted into two dozen for volleyball.

It is here at the LakePoint Sporting Community where the visiting boys and girls in their cleats and uniforms have come to play, with their parents trailing them from the diamonds and the hardwood to the fast-food restaurant­s and the hotels. In the summer, hundreds of teams pass through every week.

The youth sports economy — a world of private coaching, interstate travel and $350 baseball bats — has always been big business. But fed by the growth of traveling teams and regional and national events, the industry has doubled in size over the past decade — to more than $15 billion a year, according to one company that tracks its growth — as tournament organizers, property developers and a handful of small towns target parents who share their young athletes’ dreams of glory and have the money to pursue them.

As families travel more miles so their children can play more games and be seen by more college recruiters, sprawling complexes like the Grand Park Sports Campus in Westfield, Ind., and Rocky Top Sports World in Gatlinburg, Tenn., and LakePoint have fine-tuned both their facilities and their programs to attract millions of visitors every year. And as they have succeeded, these megacomple­xes — and other hybrid sports/vacation destinatio­ns like them — have become staples of yet another growing youth sports phenomenon: the tourna-cation circuit.

“The plan is to be like a cruise ship for youth sports,” said Bob Zurcher, the chief financial officer of LakePoint Land, which has helped turn Emerson, a town of 1,500 about 40 miles north of Atlanta, into an unlikely year-round tourist destinatio­n. “You give them firstclass competitio­n and facilities, then try to give them everything else they need right here.”

A study published by Utah State University in 2014 found that American families

spent an average of $2,292 each year on youth sports. But it also found many households that spent as much as 10.5 percent of their gross income annually — sometimes $20,000 or more — on personal trainers, travel costs and private teams for their children.

“They may be holding back on vacation or on a car, but they will make certain that Susie goes to the cheerleadi­ng competitio­n in Orlando and Johnny gets to his Little League tournament in Georgia,” said Mary Helen Sprecher, the managing editor of Sports Destinatio­n Management, a trade publicatio­n for event managers and rights holders. “These youth complexes have become part of the sports ecosystem by putting heads in beds, filling up restaurant­s and delivering economic impact.”

The miles, and the costs, can add up quickly. The Peach State Basketball Classic at LakePoint in July, for example, was only a midseason stop for Scott Wyatt and his 16-year-old daughter, Claire. Her team, the Tennessee Fury, was coming from a girls tournament in Louisville, Ky., that had attracted more than 800 teams, and it would head to an event in Atlanta a few days later.

Wyatt, a pharmacist in Knoxville, Tenn., stayed with his wife and daughter at the Holiday Inn, as the tournament required. The Fury’s game schedule was tight, which meant the families’ meal options were largely limited to the Taco Bell or the Chick-fil-A or the pizza restaurant near the complex. LakePoint officials said out-of-town visitors spend an average of $122 per person a day.

“We’re trying to get college scholarshi­ps — that’s the only

reason we are here,” Wyatt said. “The whole goal to get these girls in a school and some of it paid for.”

For the players and their parents, the potential payoff is worth the sizable investment of time and money. NCAA member universiti­es hand out about $3 billion in scholarshi­ps a year.

Disney was among the first to recognize this emerging market, and in 1997 it created the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex on the grounds of its Disney World theme park in Orlando, Fla. The 220-acre complex has nine venues — including a tennis center, outdoor fields, indoor courts and field houses — and hosts annual events such as the Pop Warner football and national cheer and dance championsh­ips.

In 2016, the Wide World of Sports complex drew more than 385,285 athletes, a 28 percent increase from 2011. But perhaps just as important to Disney was that the athletes and their families stayed in Disney hotels, ate at Disney restaurant­s, rode on Disney rides and luxuriated in Disney spas — and that the investment in sports facilities was introducin­g another generation of children to the company’s brands. In the years that followed, imitators popped up in amusement park towns such as Sandusky, Ohio, and tourist destinatio­ns like Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Entering the market was a steeper climb, however, for communitie­s like Emerson, where the youth sports facilities had to be built from scratch — along with the infrastruc­ture and every other supporting business and service.

Peter Olson, the county administra­tor, recalled the original developers’ offering

a succinct pitch for the 1,300 acres along Interstate 75. “We’ll build the ocean,” Olson said they told him, “and then the beach will be valuable.”

The county offered the developers a tax abatement for 10 years and financed the Champions Center with $36 million in bonds from its developmen­t authority. Since it opened in 2014, more than 3 million visitors from all 50 states have come to play, producing what the county said was an annual economic impact of $97.4 million.

Food, bar and hotel revenue in the county was up 80 percent, Olson said.

There have been some missteps. Building a massive youth sports developmen­t is a capital-intensive project, and the original investors ran out of cash after only 100 acres had been developed. In June, a hedge fund based near Los Angeles, Rimrock Capital Management, took the complex into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and, as the major creditor, decided to try to turn its debt into equity.

“They are doubling down,” said Dan Berman, a senior managing director of GlassRatne­r Advisory & Capital Group, the Atlanta-based firm Rimrock brought in to restructur­e the deal.

With more than $100 million already at work, a priority is more hotels and restaurant­s: Signs marking the future homes of a Holiday Inn Express and a Spring Hill Suites stand alongside the bulldozers creating the roads that will connect them with the sprawling LakePoint complex.

Berman said more sports facilities were a certainty, but Rimrock is also exploring more options, such as amusement attraction­s and a convention center.

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