Tulsa considers outdoor performance center
TULSA — Tulsans have been kicking around the idea of building a soccer stadium for decades. Now, two organizations that have played an integral role in spurring the city’s downtown resurgence would like to explore an even grander vision — the construction of an outdoor performance center.
Tulsa Stadium Trust has agreed to help VisitTulsa fund — with assistance from private donors — a study to examine the feasibility of constructing such a facility in Tulsa.
“If you do a dedicated soccer stadium, you might get 30 to 40 nights of play out of it a year” said Ray Hoyt, president of Tulsa Regional Tourism. “I don’t think that pencils out. So our goal is to create something that is a multi-use, flexible space, and maybe we’ll find more opportunities about that with the study.”
Tulsa Stadium Trust was created in 2008 to raise money and oversee the construction of ONEOK Field. The public authority also owns other properties within the Inner Dispersal Loop.
VisitTulsa is an arm of the Tulsa Regional Chamber of Commerce that focuses on attracting visitors and events to the city.
The feasibility study is expected to cost about $105,000, with the trust contributing $50,000 and VisitTulsa and private donors contributing the rest. VisitTulsa will contract with a firm to do the study. Hoyt said he expects it to be done within 60 to 90 days.
Stacy Kymes, chairman of the Stadium Trust, said donations — not public dollars — were used to pay for the trust’s contribution to the study. The authority agreed to assist because it believes the feasibility study is in keeping with its mission, Kymes said.
“The Stadium Trust has from inception had kind of, at its core, an interest in economic development activity in downtown,” Kymes said.
Officials have yet to discuss how such a facility would be funded, Hoyt said, but the thought is to begin with a 10,000seat structure that could be expanded to 18,000 or 20,000 seats.
Although the outdoor performance center could conceivably find a home in any part of town, Hoyt said, the midsize outdoor arenas going up around the country are being built in downtown markets.
“It makes similar sense (in Tulsa’s downtown) with all the infrastructure there and with restaurants and bars and hotels and entertainment,” he said.
Previous studies commissioned by VisitTulsa, including the soon-tobe-released branding and development study by Resonance Consultancy, have found that despite the fact that Tulsa has several state-of-the-art entertainment and sports venues, the city is losing out on potential attractions because it lacks a true outdoor, multi-use venue, Hoyt said.
“It would be a facility that would be designed for the flexibility that we don’t have right now at ONEOK,” Hoyt said. “So it would more than likely be something openended so you could actually perform things like races and events (that go) out of the end of it, so you could bring in portable staging and set-ups.
“You could do monster trucks outdoor performances. There are tours and concerts that only do outdoor shows.”
Although the multi-use facility would not be specifically tailored for soccer, it would be designed to accommodate the sport at the highest level, Hoyt said. As it stands now, the city can’t attract exhibition Major League Soccer or U.S. national games because it does not have a proper venue.
“We have had ongoing discussions with the national women’s soccer team, and we can never get past go, because they want a flat surface, they want a true natural turf field,” Hoyt said. “And Skelly (Field) doesn’t do that at all. It’s a synthetic field with synthetic turf.”
ONEOK Field, which was built to be the home of the Tulsa Drillers minor league baseball team, also serves as the home field for the Tulsa Roughnecks of the United Soccer League. But that venue won’t do, either, when it comes to drawing the highest levels of professional and amateur soccer and many other outdoor events, according to Hoyt.
“It’s a totally different venue,” Hoyt said. “It’s not soccer.”