When Is It Time to Expand?

By Rick Butler, Club Director, Sports Performance Volleyball Club


The Great Lakes Volleyball Center in Aurora, Illinois home to the Sports Performance Volleyball Club, the Great Lakes Power League and several other junior tournaments has added four additional courts and is now a full service 12 court volleyball only facility.  The expansion was a 4 month project that took place over the summer and was completed in October just in time for Fall/Winter programming.  

The need for additional courts came about primarily for two reasons.  The first was that the Great Lakes Center is host to many events and the amount of money and hours that was being spent on outside court rental and running offsite venues had gotten extremely costly.  Now the Great Lakes Center can host 96 teams on site per day (am & pm waves) and while the strain to have to manage off site facilities will not be completely eliminated, for now it will be much more manageable.  The second reason for the expansion was that the Sports Performance program is going to restructure their youth development program (7th grade and under) to move away from the traditional club model to an Academy model where players will have multiple training options.  

The primary focus of the Academy will be physical and technical development with competition  being a secondary element and all travel will be eliminated except for the most elite players who have long term experience.  This model will be much more cost effective in a sport that is out of control in regards to what youth and junior players are currently paying in travel fees.  It will  also allow young athletes to start playing volleyball at a much younger age while they are still involved in multiple activities and have limited time to focus on any single sport.  

Added along with the four additional courts is a 1,300 square foot parent / player lounge where parents watch their kids during training and teams can rest and relax during tournaments. The youth training center uses balloons, light balls (smaller balls bought in Japan), blow up beach balls, hula hoops and cones for agility and coordination training.  There are also several boxes that are made by SPVB staff and are basic coaches boxes.  The facility uses the Schelde net system that goes all the way down to the floor.

The expansion of the Great Lakes Center also included a new 300 car parking lot that is across the street which brings the current parking to 500 lot spaces plus parking on the street.  The Great Lakes Center now has a full service retail store and concession area, 12 courts that all have a rubber padded wooden sub-floor under the sport court playing and two restrooms each for both Women (23 stalls-8 sinks) and Men (8 stalls-8 urinals-5 sinks)


The center is not even 2 months old, but the hope if for the club to see a very large increase in overall participation among the K-7th grade age groups, especially now that the variety of youth programs allow players to receive volleyball training while also being able to participate in other sports and extra-curricular activities.

The Real Votes Show Up

By John Brannon, Club Director, Carolina Union VBC

In the last blog we had found the location for our facility and next it was only a matter of start-up funding coming together.  Initially, we had been working with a couple of capital investment companies, as well as one or two potentially big private investors.  But the private investors' primary interest was in real estate (minimum $2 million project), and when we got our quote back from the capital investment companies, the terms were prohibitive from a business perspective (no early payoff allowed, basically end up paying double for all of the equipment when all was said and done).  

At that point, I had given up the ghost a little bit and decided this would be a next year project; all the plans were ready, but without the money to make it happen there isn't much that can be done.  But then something funny happened in a single week's time; while at high school volleyball matches and being in the community, talking about our situation, people started to ask about investing $10k, $20k, as much as $40k in the project.  So in a single week I went from giving up on the idea to having almost $100k of investment promised if I signed the lease!  
Two weeks later... the lease was signed, and the conversion began!  The real nerve-racking question was whether or not this would be a field of dreams experience or not!  Only tryouts would tell the real story.

Tryouts are now finished and the new location is turning out to be a huge draw.  From last year to this year, our tryout numbers grew from 230 players to 291 players (over a 25% increase).  Best of all, we are getting new talent in the gym from parts of South Carolina and North Charlotte, places that we had pulled from previously but in very small numbers.  We will have 16 teams this year (2-13s, 3-14s, 4-15s, 3-16s, 2-17s, 2-18s), and the only thing stopping us from having more is that we will likely not be in our new facility for the first couple of weeks.  As I've told people, the only thing worse than not being able to offer enough teams for players that are good enough to be on a team is offering teams and not having enough space!

  

To the facility itself, we are currently going through “change of use” reviews with the city.  As is often the case with government programs, we are delayed a little bit!  My best advice for anyone that will go through this process is to make sure to ask multiple people in the same department the same question.  For the first three weeks after we signed our lease we were operating under a couple of key assumptions because of what two individuals downtown had told us…came to find out that they were wrong, not just in interpretation, but on the existence of certain regulatory rules in general.  So don’t worry about upsetting people because you keep asking the same questions or ask a bunch of people the same question.  It's better to get all of the correct information in the first shot than to be delayed a month!

All-in-all, the excitement around the club and the volleyball community as a whole is palpable.  We’re excited about our future and growth of volleyball in the Charlotte area!