Visit Beloit, Huddle Up Group Present Sports Facility Options

Matt Bosen and Celestino Ruffini of Visit Beloit began the presentation with some background on the process. Citizens who were involved with the Beloit Youth Hockey Association had been meeting to talk about the future of hockey in Beloit and had conversations about what will happen with the Edwards Ice Arena at 2101 Cranston Road.

That group sought feedback from Visit Beloit about the feasibility of a sports complex. From there, Visit Beloit decided it would be best to hire a company to come in and look at assets the community has for, not just hockey, but all sports. That’s where Visit Beloit found Huddle Up Group and had them conduct a sports venue audit for Beloit.

Bosen and Ruffini then handed the presentation over to Jon Schmieder, CEO of Huddle Up Group, to show his company’s findings. Schmeider spoke about how his organization conducted many stakeholder interviews and venue audits. He also spoke about facility enhancements, development of a “game plan,” conducted town hall meetings and sought possible opportunities for a youth sports facility in Janesville.

Huddle Up Group’s audit showed Beloit has a similar tourism structure to places like Green Bay, Elgin, Illinois and Duluth, Minnesota. The city’s strengths include a strong business community, good location, strong regional competition and solid community alignment.

Schmieder and his team visited 20 sites that had 37 sports event venues in those sites.

The first recommendation they gave would be to create a new flat field complex with indoor turf. The complex would include eight fields with 25% artificial turf and at least one full field indoors. The complex would also include one stadium field with 1,000 permanent seats and include all amenities event rights holders would want, for example: event parking and concessions.

Huddle Up Group believes this complex’s impact would create 12 new state, regional and national tournaments; over 23,000 total attendees related to said tournaments; and nearly $6.6 million visitor spending. The total sports tourism related taxes could generate an estimated $280,000.

The second recommendation would be a new or enhanced multi-sheet ice facility. This facility would include two ice sheets, one year-round rink and one seasonal rink for non-ice events. This could bring $2 million in visitor spending and create a total of approximately $100,000 in sports tourism related taxes.

The last recommendation would be to enhance an existing diamond complex and have it include 12 full-size fields, specifically recommending enhancing the Stateline Family YMCA Youth Sport Complex.

Ruffini did state after the presentation that potential sites for a facility would not be included. He did say public or private landowners may come forward after seeing the presentation, but Visit Beloit is not at that stage yet.

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