In the part of Oklahoma I cover, I can count six towns building, expanding or planning youth sports complexes, and those are just the ones I know about. There’s a good reason for that. When Sports ETA, the industry’s trade association, surveyed tourism offices about 2019, the most common reason they gave for losing a sports event was that they didn’t have enough fields or courts to host it. When there isn’t enough of something, people start building it, and towns have.
Most of those towns are building with economic development in mind. They’re counting on out-of-town teams, and the families who travel with them, to fill hotels and restaurants. I’d like to see every one of these projects succeed. My question is whether, with this many towns counting on the same thing, they’ll all get what they’re expecting.
The size of the industry makes that sound like a silly question. Sports ETA estimates that sports travel generated $111.2 billion in direct spending in 2025, and $60.1 billion of that came from people traveling to play. Most of that is youth and amateur sports, which means families spending Friday night in a hotel three hours from home so they can make a Saturday morning game. But a town isn’t competing for the whole $60 billion. It’s competing for the teams within a few hours’ drive, which is a much smaller and much more competitive pool.
What the economic development case actually is
A sports complex’s own books rarely work. Rental fees and concession sales seldom cover staff and upkeep, let alone the debt. That’s normal and doesn’t mean anything went wrong. The point is the spending around the complex: hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and the development that grows up nearby. If the sales tax and hotel tax those visitors generate cover the debt payments and the maintenance, the town has won, even if the complex itself posts a loss every year.
Grand Park in Westfield, Indiana, the complex every city seems to point to, is the example. In 2022, council member Troy Patton walked his colleagues through the numbers. The park took in $6.14 million in 2021 against $3.37 million in expenses, and about $2.9 million in depreciation wiped out the difference. “Grand Park does not make money,” he said. But by 2023, tax revenue from the development district around the park covered its debt payments, according to the Indianapolis Business Journal, and Mayor Scott Willis told the paper the park was never meant to turn a profit on its own.
That’s a perfectly reasonable deal. It took about nine years, and Westfield has probably the best-known youth sports campus in the country.
What kind of complex are you building?
Not every complex is trying to do the same thing, and the economic development expectations should depend on which one you’re building.
Some towns are building fields for their own kids. The local league has outgrown the diamonds behind the elementary school, so the town adds a few more, often with a grant. That’s a parks decision and should be judged like one. Nobody expects the new T-ball field to fill the Hampton Inn.
Elk City is the regional version. It has 16 turf fields for baseball, softball and T-ball in a stretch of western Oklahoma where there wasn’t much else, and it draws teams from the two or three hours around it. It isn’t chasing national championships. From what I hear, it’s doing well. I don’t have numbers to prove that, but a complex that fills a gap nobody else is filling has an easier job than one competing with several others for the same teams.
Westfield is the national version, with 31 soccer fields, 26 baseball diamonds and an events center of about 378,000 square feet. Even there, the payoff came from the development around the park, and it came slowly.
The trouble tends to start when the expectations don’t match the complex. A regional complex can do very well at being a regional complex. Expecting it to produce national-destination results is a different bet, and usually a more expensive one.
Where the expectations come from
Expectations usually start with a pitch and a projection.
When Etowah County, Alabama started clearing land for its Mega Sports Complex in 2018, the plan was 14 soccer fields in the first phase, with archery, cross country, a pet park and an RV park, and baseball and softball to follow. ABC 33/40 reported it would cost about $25 million “at no extra cost to taxpayers,” with the money coming from local lodging taxes. By 2021, the authority building it had spent its $5.5 million bond, plus money it didn’t have, and was asking for up to $10 million more. The Legislature reorganized the authority’s board in 2022 and, in 2025, handed the finances to the City of Rainbow City, which takes ownership once the debt is paid off. The complex’s website today lists six soccer fields.
Fort Bend County, outside Houston, is paying for its Epicenter, an arena with indoor courts for basketball and volleyball tournaments, through a 30-year lease-purchase deal that works a lot like a mortgage. Commissioner Andy Meyers told the Fort Bend Independent he had supported the project because he’d been told it would break even after three years. “I learned later that they were not including the lease payment of $6.4 mil,” he said. The Epicenter broke even on paper by leaving out the cost of the building.
Projections depend a lot on who makes them. In late 2023 and early 2024, Palm Coast, Florida had two consulting firms study the same proposed complex. One estimated $30 million in economic impact the first year and operating deficits for the first two years. The other estimated $79 million and a surplus from year one. Same site, same town, same kids. The difference was who was doing the guessing.
Even when a consultant’s projections hold up, they may not answer the question the town is actually asking. In September 2026, KTBS in Shreveport looked at complexes whose feasibility studies were done by the same consultant Caddo Parish hired for its own proposed complex. In most cases, the station found, spending by visitors met or beat projections while the facilities themselves lost money and missed the financial projections local governments had been given.
A projection is a best guess made by someone who would like to be hired to build, run or finance the thing. That doesn’t make it dishonest. It does make it a strange place to go for an independent opinion.
What could change the math
A good feasibility study looks at the competition within driving distance. But it can only count the complexes that are open or announced when it’s written. It can’t count the ones the towns down the highway are commissioning studies for that same year. The simplest fix is for towns in a region to talk to each other before they build. If the town next door is planning eight baseball diamonds, you want to know that before you design yours, and two towns building for different sports may both be better off than two building for the same one.
Nationally, L.E.K. Consulting counted more than $2.5 billion invested in new or upgraded youth complexes between 2024 and 2026, and one operator, Sports Facilities Companies, announced 10 openings, reopenings and new partnerships for the second half of 2026 alone. Around Oklahoma, Lawton is building a $40 million first phase due in late 2027. Rogers, Arkansas reopened eight turf baseball and softball fields in May. A complex north of Fort Worth is bringing eight new baseball fields online between now and February, and an eight-field baseball complex broke ground north of Wichita in 2024.
The industry knows this. One of the Palm Coast consultants told the local paper that older, basic complexes “will tend to begin to start losing” to newer ones with better amenities. Project Play at the Aspen Institute cites a Youth Sports Business Report prediction that by 2030, regional tournament facilities in the middle of the market face the most risk. More complexes than tournaments means some fields end up sitting empty, and a feasibility study can’t tell you in advance which ones.
Then there are the kids themselves. Americans are having fewer of them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 3,606,400 births in the United States in 2025, and the fertility rate has fallen 23 percent since 2007. A complex that opens in 2027 should still be hosting tournaments in 2050, and the 12-year-olds who will play there in 2037 were born last year.
The Congressional Budget Office projects the fertility rate will keep sliding, to 1.53 births per woman by 2036, and that the number of Americans 24 and younger will shrink every year for the next 30 years. Not every forecaster agrees; Social Security’s trustees expect fertility to rebound somewhat. But nobody is projecting a baby boom.
Those are national numbers, and local ones can go either way. A fast-growing suburb may gain kids while the country has fewer, and a rural county may lose them faster, so the numbers that matter are the ones for your own region. A useful question for a town is how many kids will be playing in 10 or 20 years, rather than how many played over the last five.
So far, participation has held up. L.E.K. reports that team sports participation among kids 6 to 17 rose 9 percent in 2024, and families spent about $1,000 per athlete that year, up from roughly $700 in 2019. More spending may mean more tournaments per team, but it can’t create teams out of kids who aren’t there. You can’t field five teams with enough kids for three, no matter what their parents are willing to spend. A 30-year bond is a long time to bet that a growing share of a shrinking group of kids will keep playing.
Setting realistic expectations
A projection tells you what someone expects to happen. A town that built a complex five or 10 years ago can tell you what actually happened, and many of those numbers are in public budgets and audits. Look for towns about your size, in a similar spot on the map, that built something similar. Then pick up the phone and ask their finance director whether the taxes the complex brings in actually cover the debt and the upkeep. That conversation is free, and nobody on the other end is trying to sell you something.
Some questions worth answering before moving forward:
Is this complex for local, regional or national play, and are our expectations sized to match?
Does the break-even projection include what it costs to pay for the building, whether that’s debt or lease payments, and depreciation?
Who wrote the feasibility study, and are they also hoping to build or operate the complex?
How much will the city actually collect in taxes, as opposed to how much visitors are projected to spend?
Who else within three or four hours is building fields for the same sport?
What’s the plan when the turf wears out? Westfield’s two most recent small deficits came mostly from capital improvements, including turf replacement.
The people working on these projects are smart, and they want to make good decisions. My hope is that every town does its homework before it spends tens of millions of dollars, and that the numbers it relies on come from somewhere other than the people who want the job.
Sources
Sports ETA, 2026 State of the Industry Report release, April 22, 2026: https://www.sportseta.org/blog/2026/04/22/sports-eta-unveils-2026-state-of-the-industry-report-defining-a-2745-billion-sports-tourism-economy
Sports ETA, State of the Industry Report (2019): https://research.sportseta.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2019-State-of-the-Industry-Report.pdf
Current in Westfield, May 2, 2022: https://www.youarecurrent.com/2022/05/02/westfield-city-council-member-declares-grand-park-does-not-make-money/
Indianapolis Business Journal, February 7, 2025: https://www.ibj.com/articles/grand-park-sports-campus-realizing-financial-potential-as-new-district-awaits
Visit Elk City: https://visitelkcity.com/attractions/sports/
ABC 33/40, October 12, 2018: https://abc3340.com/news/local/mega-sports-complex-to-bring-jobs-money-to-etowah-county
CBS 42, September 23, 2021: https://www.cbs42.com/news/local/alabama-lawmaker-raises-questions-over-spending-on-etowah-county-sports-complex/
Code of Alabama § 45-28-220.03: https://law.justia.com/codes/alabama/title-45/chapter-28/article-22/section-45-28-220-03/
Etowah Mega Sports Complex: https://etowahsportscomplex.com/
Fort Bend Independent, May 8, 2026: https://fbindependent.com/epicenter-a-failure-or-a-stepping-stone-to-success-p16487-1.htm
Palm Coast Observer, February 14, 2024: https://www.observerlocalnews.com/news/2024/feb/14/new-study-on-proposed-sports-complex-estimates-79-million-economic-impact-in-first-year-alone/
KTBS, September 3, 2026: https://www.ktbs.com/news/3investigates/sports-facilities-deliver-economic-impact-while-operating-at-a-loss/article_d87f14c6-5625-4f72-b97d-7a1bf143b349.html
L.E.K. Consulting, February 27, 2026: https://www.lek.com/insights/media-entertainment/most-investable-segments-youth-sports-going-2026
Youth Sports Business Report, July 28, 2026: https://youthsportsbusinessreport.com/sports-facilities-companies-lines-up-10-youth-sports-facility-openings-for-late-2026/
City of Lawton: https://www.lawtonok.gov/700/Sports-Complex
City of Rogers, April 8, 2026: https://www.rogersar.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=424
KNWA, November 23, 2022: https://www.nwahomepage.com/news/rogers-to-spend-10-million-on-park-renovation/
Sports Planning Guide, May 10, 2026: https://sportsplanningguide.com/new-sports-facilities-in-texas/
Prep Baseball Report, June 21, 2024: https://www.prepbaseballreport.com/news/PBR/prep-baseball-tournaments-set-to-manage-operations-at-wichita-s-new--champtown-
Project Play: https://projectplay.org/state-of-play-2025/10-youth-sports-trends-to-watch
CDC, Births: Provisional Data for 2025: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr043.pdf
Congressional Budget Office, The Demographic Outlook: 2026 to 2056, January 2026: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61994