Louisville: OVVC Gets the Ball Rolling

OHIO VALLEY VOLLEYBALL CENTER

Louisville, Kentucky

By Ron Kordes, Club Director of Kiva and Head Coach at Assumption High School

In 1993 I was fortunate enough to have a local contractor’s daughter playing on my high school team.  I coached and still coach at a private high school named Assumption High School.  We were playing and practicing in a high school gym that was not much larger than many walk in closets that you see today.  One particular day we were having lunch and we drove by a construction site as he needed to check on a job they had going on at the time.  In talking volleyball, I told him about a facility in Chicago that my club team had played in called the Great Lakes Center owned and operated by Rick Butler and Sports Performance Volleyball Club.

About three days later I get this phone call and he asked if I was interested in pursuing the notion of building and operating a volleyball center.  Obviously, I was in his office in less than 15 minutes.  We laid out the initial plans, and he began the construction project while I focused on the volleyball side of things: vendors, equipment, programming, etc.  The start-up capital was provided by my partner.  At the time, banks were not fond of lending money for a volleyball center as there was no track record of success to reference.  My partners' borrowing power made it happen.  Even his bonding company questioned him as to why a contractor was getting involved with a volleyball venture.

Just over three months later we opened the Ohio Valley Volleyball Center.  When we built OVVC, there were very few volleyball facilities in the country.  We started with four courts and were at capacity with adult night leagues within a month.  At that time we also rented space to a local junior club I was associated with called KJVA.  Approximately 18 months later we expanded to 6 courts of which we have today.

The features of the OVVC:

6 indoor volleyball courts using Sport Court playing surfaces

SENOH net systems

NEVCO electronic scoreboards

Full service grill 
Pro shop
Weight training room 
Spacious mezzanine for watching games and socializing
Televisions and arcade games

In the year 2000, we formed the Kentucky Indiana Volleyball Academy, which operates out of the center and today includes about 30 girls teams.  Today, our revenue is spread among KIVA club activities, hosting junior club tournaments, adult night leagues, camps, clinics and numerous other junior events.  Since we opened in 1993, there have been four other sports centers that opened in the metro Louisville area.  This has provided the opportunity for so many young girls and boys to get involved in the great game of volleyball.  We will be celebrating our 20^th anniversary next summer and look forward to many years ahead.  

Is the Location Right?

By John Brannon, Club Director, Carolina Union VBC

I ended the last blog by asking, “Do I want to let the perfect be the enemy of the very good.”  For about a week after my first visit, I kept going back to the building at all hours with some of our coaches to get their opinion.  They all loved it!  But coaches don’t pay the bills, they are the bills, so I knew that it was imperative to get the opinion of some of our club parents who I knew, who I trusted, and who lived in the south side of Charlotte (where about a third of our players live). 

This was a fascinating exercise, because each of them had the same reaction when I first mentioned the location; they winced.  I wasn't shocked by this reaction, because part of the difficulty with perception in the greater Charlotte area is the way the counties are set up; on a map it looks like gerrymandered political districts because there’s no good explanation for the random county lines.  In any case, a lot of the South Charlotte area parents live in Union County, the same county as our current high school home (Weddington High) and our former sports facility practice location.  But getting to that sports facility from South Charlotte during rush hour is a nightmare, it’s an easy half hour for most of our kids, the new facility is a few miles farther away, but the drive is about ten minutes shorter. 

So I asked them to drive during rush hour to really get the feel for what travel to a club practice would be like.  Every one of them came back with the same answer:  “That was an easy drive!”  And all of a sudden, the shift in locations (southeast to southwest) was seen as a benefit rather than a detriment. 

Next, I told some of those parents to start talking around the idea so that we could get a read on our players and parents. While I don’t believe that we should make all of our decisions based on majority opinion, in this case I did think it was important to have the majority of our customers on board.  We place a high value on our players feeling like this is their club, so it was important not to move to a place that cut off most of those kids. 

But ease of access had other benefits long term.  For a couple of years we have pulled several players from places as far north as Hickory, NC (about 45 northwest of Charlotte), and as far south as Columbia, SC (90 minutes from Charlotte).  The new location is one minute off of the main highway that runs north and south through North and South Carolina, enabling us to draw more players from cities along this route.

It was early August, and at this point all signs pointed to go.  All we needed was our startup funding to come together …