Post by Gene on Dec 12, 2011 10:08:04 GMT -5
By: ZACHARY REID
Published: December 11, 2011
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SportsQuest is a cash cow for Chesterfield County, a money-making stroke of genius that is generating millions of dollars in new revenue before the 250-acre amateur athletic complex is anywhere near finished. Things are going so well, it already has spawned a residential academy for basketball players.
Or, SportsQuest is a boondoggle in the making, a dizzying, delusional vision of Olympic glory that's out of touch with what's possible in central Virginia, a business that has had trouble paying its bills and that has become the target of harsh criticism from former employees and from people who thought they were buying into a world-class fitness center.
Whichever version you prefer — and there are vocal fans and detractors on both sides and nearly everywhere in between — the one thing certain about SportsQuest is that the conversation quickly turns to the group's founder, chief executive and directional force, Steve Burton.
Three years ago, Burton — a clinical psychologist and medical software developer who was then heading development for U.S. Speedskating — appeared before Chesterfield leaders with a grand vision for a sprawling multisport complex on parallel campuses bisected by state Route 288 in the western part of the county.
He had the land, he said, but the project would need to be funded by a combination of private, corporate, charitable and tax dollars. He was putting in an as-yet-unspecified amount of his own money and was in the market for cash and in-kind contributions from other sources.
Ever since, Burton has been a beacon for the lure of sports tourism dollars that Chesterfield is chasing and a whipping boy for every misstep and failure along the way.
Bermuda District Supervisor Dorothy A. Jaeckle has long been a supporter and has kept a position statement on SportsQuest on her website ever since voting in the summer of 2010 in favor of spending $4.3 million in county money on the complex.
The Chesterfield money was a prepayment on a lease for fields and for a senior center and an indoor basketball court.
"I favored the Sports- Quest agreement because I believe it will enhance opportunities for Chesterfield children and adults to participate in a number of sports while also spurring economic development," she said.
Midlothian Supervisor Daniel A. Gecker has supported SportsQuest as well, referring to it as a no-brainer.
"It's a prepayment on a lease," he said. "The county is well-protected in this agreement."
The fields are already built. If SportsQuest fails to deliver a senior center and basketball court in the next year, it must refund $2 million to the county. The county also holds a first lien on the property, so if everything goes wrong, the county still gets a sports complex.
* * * * *
The vision for Sports- Quest, Burton said in the beginning, was to create an Olympic village where elite athletes from around the nation would come to train. In it, there would also be shops, restaurants, hotels and enough village-style amenities that participants and spectators alike would never need to leave.
It would include space for everything from youth league sports tournaments to professional team venues to an amphitheater to keep everyone entertained between games. And the complex would be open to dues-paying members who would be joining a fitness campus unlike any other in the area.
It was a big plan — $100 million to $250 million, depending on who was counting and what factored into the tally — with artist renderings and architectural drawings to match.
But the idea seemed rushed at the time, and it came amid an economic downturn that would become so bad that the county would cut teachers, scale back library hours and curtail most large building projects.
"We came out a year early, because you remember what Chesterfield County did the week before I went there?" Burton said. "They announced an initiative for sports tourism. So we made a strategic decision. We weren't planning to go public yet, but we can't afford to not talk about that partnership. So we began discussions then, that week, when that was reported. And it was a year before we put our package together to kind of take big steps forward."
On the sports tourism front, SportsQuest has been a success. The campus has 12 turf fields — Burton claims it's the largest complex of its kind in the country — and it has hosted national-level youth tournaments in soccer, lacrosse and field hockey. For the fiscal year that ended June 30, the Chesterfield budget staff estimated a sports tourism impact of more than $12 million. They couldn't break out a SportsQuest-specific contribution, but the complex is by far the county's biggest draw for out-of-town athletes.
"[That] doesn't get reported very well," Burton said. "A lot of the community misunderstands that, to tell you the truth. … Because a lot of times I get the statement, 'Oh, we have tournaments all the time.' But if you have a 100-team tournament and 80 percent of them are within 40 minutes, they don't take a hotel room, they don't eat in restaurants, they don't shop at a shop. So the impact of that tournament is hugely different. The USA Field Hockey club national championship was here. It was only 64 teams, but I think all but three of them were [from] outside the community. So it generated more economic development than a 250-team tournament that was here the week before."
On that count, Burton can find support from Jon Lugbill, a former Olympic athlete and now the head of Sports Backers, which promotes participatory sports throughout the area. Sports Backers and SportsQuest are independent organizations. Burton and Lugbill are part of an informal group of area sports leaders that meets monthly, but they work independently of each other.
It was to Sports Backers that Chesterfield leaders looked for ideas on sports tourism. And as recently as this fall, Sports Backers was back before the Board of Supervisors offering an update on the topic.
"There's a big opportunity long-term for different kinds of tournaments," Lugbill said of the Sports- Quest campus the week before Thanksgiving. "It's a big deal. It's two things. It provides money. It's hotels and restaurants and retail shopping. It also provides an opportunity to local teams. It helps elevate their level of play. It inspires, it motivates them to reach to a higher level."
But for every success, SportsQuest also seems to have a failure.
It has 12 turf fields, and plans are under way for an additional five, but it also has about $270,000 in mechanic's liens on its property filed by vendors who worked on those fields and another outstanding bill of nearly $17,000 for landscaping.
On a program level, SportsQuest did have a field hockey tournament, but the woman Burton hired to attract elite field hockey and lacrosse programs, former Boston University and University of Richmond lacrosse coach Sue Murphy, left Sports- Quest last summer, saying she hadn't been paid according to her contract.
Burton said the parting with Murphy was amicable.
"Difference of vision where the program would go," he said. "Pretty simple. Again, I think Sue's a great lady. A different vision of where we wanted to go."
When asked if he had paid her what her contract called for, Burton answered, "Yeah."
In a subsequent interview, Burton said, "She elected to resign. Saying anything other than that is going to inflame circumstances. There's a difference in opinion on what she's owed. Our opinion is, we're square."
Murphy said she had "absolutely not" been paid all she was due, and she scoffed at the idea of a "difference of vision."
She said Burton had taken her company — Premier Lacrosse, which was folded into SportsQuest when she signed on — and not properly compensated her. She said she was still owed $25,000 in salary and $225,000 in membership fees.
Murphy said she couldn't afford to hire a lawyer to fight Burton.
The controversy isn't the first Burton has faced.
While there has always been a sense of urgency with the plan for Sports- Quest, Burton insists it has been fluid. And a misunderstanding of that has led to much confusion.
At one time, he hired a director of professional sports who wanted to attract an NBA development team. Later, Burton added a professional indoor football team. But now, the focus has shifted exclusively to amateur sports, both in tournaments and in a fledgling residential sports academy that opened this fall with about 20 basketball players.
"It's important for people to recognize, it's not all about when you're done, because ultimately SportsQuest may never be done," he said. "It's always going to evolve, it's always going to expand."
* * * * *
How it's going to evolve is the big question.
Burton says he has $54.7 million committed to the project, with the money coming in roughly equal portions from his four target sources: private funding, corporate sponsorships, charitable giving and tax dollars.
But he wouldn't identify specific sources or amounts. And accessing all of that money isn't as simple as writing a check. Much of it, particularly a grant of up to $10 million from Chesterfield, is tied to certain performance levels.
The county money is only available if Burton can prove $80 million in other investment and the creation of 400 jobs. And even then, the grant comes in the form of rebates on certain real estate and sales tax paid, so it's paid back after the fact, not upfront.
"One of the important elements of a campus like what we're doing, it requires a lot of cooperative partners," he said. "You could never build a $100 million campus all on debt, because it couldn't serve that. You couldn't build it all on private equity. You couldn't build it all on public dollars because there's not enough public dollars. And you can't do it all on charitable venture because there's not enough charitable giving. So it's got to be a blend. … Negotiating those four different groups of interest is challenging. Sometimes, all of their interests align. And sometimes, they don't."
Those interests have aligned in recent years on similar projects for other groups.
Sports Backers has found the funding for a wide variety of participatory programs, from its namesake stadium near The Diamond to an annual 10-kilometer foot race that attracts one of the largest groups of participants in the country for a race its type.
"I think we're actually very supportive of participatory sports," Lugbill said of the Richmond area. "A participatory-based sports complex [like SportsQuest] has some real potential value."
But the village of Olympic-type venues that are geared to elite athletes, Lugbill said, is a tougher sell.
"How it's financially put together is important," he said, adding that some of the venues simply weren't feasible if they had to be financed. "I think even [Burton] is reconsidering what he can build."
Burton said the first real building at his complex will be a fitness and aquatics center, a $30 million facility that he said could be up and running in less than two years.
Bobby Ukrop, a former grocery store magnate who is the president of the Sports Backers board of directors, said Sports- Quest didn't help or hinder his plans for an Olympic-caliber pool project he's heading in eastern Chesterfield. That project is already well under way and is scheduled to open in February.
"We were told they'd be up and running a year ago," said Ukrop, the head of the Greater Richmond Aquatic Partnership, which is building a multipool facility adjacent to the Richmond Kickers soccer complex just off Chippenham Parkway at Iron Bridge Road.
People connected to the area's top amateur swimming program, NOVA of Virginia Aquatics, in western Henrico County, said they weren't concerned, either. The bulk of their membership, they said, lived within an easy drive of their pool, which is on Gayton Road near John Rolfe Parkway.
* * * * *
Spend an hour with Burton, and he'll talk his way into and out of any problem. And for all the naysayers, plentiful as they are, he can point to at least a touch of success.
He has his fields, he has a variety of off-site venues and, since this fall, he has a residential sports academy.
It's not the 75- to 150-student school he envisioned last spring, nor the 750-resident, 750-commuter supercampus he hopes to create. But it is two dozen or so actual students, living in town and combining classroom work and basketball training.
They pay up to $40,000 each per year to pursue what Burton labeled a "passion" for their sport.
"This is really people who are more passionate about things, who want to try to extend their basketball career," Burton said. "Oak Hill," a private school in far western Virginia that is known for its A-list basketball players, "a lot of those guys, they're all focused on the NBA. Our guys, they're passionate about their sport, but it might just simply be a desire to play basketball in college. They might be looking solidly at a [Division III], and that's their goal and no fantasy of ever getting in the NBA."
Right now, those students are living in rented dormitory space at the Independence Golf Club in Chesterfield and practicing at the Richmond Volleyball Club, where Burton rented space for the "San Antonio court," the court from last year's NCAA men's basketball tournament on which the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University played Sweet 16 games.
Standing in the building, Burton gets visibly excited looking at the dark, empty volleyball courts next to his well-lit basketball court and pegs that as a likely next sport for his academy.
"I just want to enrich lives through sports," he said. "That's what this is all about."
Getting there, though, hasn't been easy. Part of it is the economy, part of it is Burton himself — he's the undisputed focus of SportsQuest; minus him, the organization simply doesn't exist — and part of it, he said, is the area.
"I think Richmond has enjoyed the benefits of being a conservative community," he said. "That's why Richmond is what it is. That's why it's a nice place to live. That's why it lives within many of its means. But it also presents one of the challenges when you try to present big vision, because if you're a conservative person, you're more likely to question it than to embrace it. So that presents some challenges in our community, but they're overcomeable.
"Richmond underestimates the value that it brings as a tournament center. Half of the U.S. population could get in a car and be on our campus in a day. That's a huge strategic advantage for tournaments. And we're matched against Disney and they've got Mickey, but all of the teams to go there have to get on a plane and fly. So you will measure your desire to participate in that venue very carefully. Whereas us, you can put your team in a van and be on our campus in four or five hours. You'll come much more often. We don't have some of the challenges of Disney. I don't have to cooperate with all of the Mickey programming."
As for the rest of his campus, Burton is his usual vaguely optimistic self.
He said representatives from at least 17 Olympic sports programs had been to his campus and that he hoped he could land six. BMX bicycle racing and wrestling are two of the six; Burton declined to name the other four.
"We want to be a location for Olympic sports programming development," he said. "That's one part of our platform, and it's an important one."
www2.timesdispatch.com/news/2011/dec/11/tdmain01-sportsquest-still-chasing-goal-ar-1535426/
Published: December 11, 2011
» 0 Comments | Post a Comment
SportsQuest is a cash cow for Chesterfield County, a money-making stroke of genius that is generating millions of dollars in new revenue before the 250-acre amateur athletic complex is anywhere near finished. Things are going so well, it already has spawned a residential academy for basketball players.
Or, SportsQuest is a boondoggle in the making, a dizzying, delusional vision of Olympic glory that's out of touch with what's possible in central Virginia, a business that has had trouble paying its bills and that has become the target of harsh criticism from former employees and from people who thought they were buying into a world-class fitness center.
Whichever version you prefer — and there are vocal fans and detractors on both sides and nearly everywhere in between — the one thing certain about SportsQuest is that the conversation quickly turns to the group's founder, chief executive and directional force, Steve Burton.
Three years ago, Burton — a clinical psychologist and medical software developer who was then heading development for U.S. Speedskating — appeared before Chesterfield leaders with a grand vision for a sprawling multisport complex on parallel campuses bisected by state Route 288 in the western part of the county.
He had the land, he said, but the project would need to be funded by a combination of private, corporate, charitable and tax dollars. He was putting in an as-yet-unspecified amount of his own money and was in the market for cash and in-kind contributions from other sources.
Ever since, Burton has been a beacon for the lure of sports tourism dollars that Chesterfield is chasing and a whipping boy for every misstep and failure along the way.
Bermuda District Supervisor Dorothy A. Jaeckle has long been a supporter and has kept a position statement on SportsQuest on her website ever since voting in the summer of 2010 in favor of spending $4.3 million in county money on the complex.
The Chesterfield money was a prepayment on a lease for fields and for a senior center and an indoor basketball court.
"I favored the Sports- Quest agreement because I believe it will enhance opportunities for Chesterfield children and adults to participate in a number of sports while also spurring economic development," she said.
Midlothian Supervisor Daniel A. Gecker has supported SportsQuest as well, referring to it as a no-brainer.
"It's a prepayment on a lease," he said. "The county is well-protected in this agreement."
The fields are already built. If SportsQuest fails to deliver a senior center and basketball court in the next year, it must refund $2 million to the county. The county also holds a first lien on the property, so if everything goes wrong, the county still gets a sports complex.
* * * * *
The vision for Sports- Quest, Burton said in the beginning, was to create an Olympic village where elite athletes from around the nation would come to train. In it, there would also be shops, restaurants, hotels and enough village-style amenities that participants and spectators alike would never need to leave.
It would include space for everything from youth league sports tournaments to professional team venues to an amphitheater to keep everyone entertained between games. And the complex would be open to dues-paying members who would be joining a fitness campus unlike any other in the area.
It was a big plan — $100 million to $250 million, depending on who was counting and what factored into the tally — with artist renderings and architectural drawings to match.
But the idea seemed rushed at the time, and it came amid an economic downturn that would become so bad that the county would cut teachers, scale back library hours and curtail most large building projects.
"We came out a year early, because you remember what Chesterfield County did the week before I went there?" Burton said. "They announced an initiative for sports tourism. So we made a strategic decision. We weren't planning to go public yet, but we can't afford to not talk about that partnership. So we began discussions then, that week, when that was reported. And it was a year before we put our package together to kind of take big steps forward."
On the sports tourism front, SportsQuest has been a success. The campus has 12 turf fields — Burton claims it's the largest complex of its kind in the country — and it has hosted national-level youth tournaments in soccer, lacrosse and field hockey. For the fiscal year that ended June 30, the Chesterfield budget staff estimated a sports tourism impact of more than $12 million. They couldn't break out a SportsQuest-specific contribution, but the complex is by far the county's biggest draw for out-of-town athletes.
"[That] doesn't get reported very well," Burton said. "A lot of the community misunderstands that, to tell you the truth. … Because a lot of times I get the statement, 'Oh, we have tournaments all the time.' But if you have a 100-team tournament and 80 percent of them are within 40 minutes, they don't take a hotel room, they don't eat in restaurants, they don't shop at a shop. So the impact of that tournament is hugely different. The USA Field Hockey club national championship was here. It was only 64 teams, but I think all but three of them were [from] outside the community. So it generated more economic development than a 250-team tournament that was here the week before."
On that count, Burton can find support from Jon Lugbill, a former Olympic athlete and now the head of Sports Backers, which promotes participatory sports throughout the area. Sports Backers and SportsQuest are independent organizations. Burton and Lugbill are part of an informal group of area sports leaders that meets monthly, but they work independently of each other.
It was to Sports Backers that Chesterfield leaders looked for ideas on sports tourism. And as recently as this fall, Sports Backers was back before the Board of Supervisors offering an update on the topic.
"There's a big opportunity long-term for different kinds of tournaments," Lugbill said of the Sports- Quest campus the week before Thanksgiving. "It's a big deal. It's two things. It provides money. It's hotels and restaurants and retail shopping. It also provides an opportunity to local teams. It helps elevate their level of play. It inspires, it motivates them to reach to a higher level."
But for every success, SportsQuest also seems to have a failure.
It has 12 turf fields, and plans are under way for an additional five, but it also has about $270,000 in mechanic's liens on its property filed by vendors who worked on those fields and another outstanding bill of nearly $17,000 for landscaping.
On a program level, SportsQuest did have a field hockey tournament, but the woman Burton hired to attract elite field hockey and lacrosse programs, former Boston University and University of Richmond lacrosse coach Sue Murphy, left Sports- Quest last summer, saying she hadn't been paid according to her contract.
Burton said the parting with Murphy was amicable.
"Difference of vision where the program would go," he said. "Pretty simple. Again, I think Sue's a great lady. A different vision of where we wanted to go."
When asked if he had paid her what her contract called for, Burton answered, "Yeah."
In a subsequent interview, Burton said, "She elected to resign. Saying anything other than that is going to inflame circumstances. There's a difference in opinion on what she's owed. Our opinion is, we're square."
Murphy said she had "absolutely not" been paid all she was due, and she scoffed at the idea of a "difference of vision."
She said Burton had taken her company — Premier Lacrosse, which was folded into SportsQuest when she signed on — and not properly compensated her. She said she was still owed $25,000 in salary and $225,000 in membership fees.
Murphy said she couldn't afford to hire a lawyer to fight Burton.
The controversy isn't the first Burton has faced.
While there has always been a sense of urgency with the plan for Sports- Quest, Burton insists it has been fluid. And a misunderstanding of that has led to much confusion.
At one time, he hired a director of professional sports who wanted to attract an NBA development team. Later, Burton added a professional indoor football team. But now, the focus has shifted exclusively to amateur sports, both in tournaments and in a fledgling residential sports academy that opened this fall with about 20 basketball players.
"It's important for people to recognize, it's not all about when you're done, because ultimately SportsQuest may never be done," he said. "It's always going to evolve, it's always going to expand."
* * * * *
How it's going to evolve is the big question.
Burton says he has $54.7 million committed to the project, with the money coming in roughly equal portions from his four target sources: private funding, corporate sponsorships, charitable giving and tax dollars.
But he wouldn't identify specific sources or amounts. And accessing all of that money isn't as simple as writing a check. Much of it, particularly a grant of up to $10 million from Chesterfield, is tied to certain performance levels.
The county money is only available if Burton can prove $80 million in other investment and the creation of 400 jobs. And even then, the grant comes in the form of rebates on certain real estate and sales tax paid, so it's paid back after the fact, not upfront.
"One of the important elements of a campus like what we're doing, it requires a lot of cooperative partners," he said. "You could never build a $100 million campus all on debt, because it couldn't serve that. You couldn't build it all on private equity. You couldn't build it all on public dollars because there's not enough public dollars. And you can't do it all on charitable venture because there's not enough charitable giving. So it's got to be a blend. … Negotiating those four different groups of interest is challenging. Sometimes, all of their interests align. And sometimes, they don't."
Those interests have aligned in recent years on similar projects for other groups.
Sports Backers has found the funding for a wide variety of participatory programs, from its namesake stadium near The Diamond to an annual 10-kilometer foot race that attracts one of the largest groups of participants in the country for a race its type.
"I think we're actually very supportive of participatory sports," Lugbill said of the Richmond area. "A participatory-based sports complex [like SportsQuest] has some real potential value."
But the village of Olympic-type venues that are geared to elite athletes, Lugbill said, is a tougher sell.
"How it's financially put together is important," he said, adding that some of the venues simply weren't feasible if they had to be financed. "I think even [Burton] is reconsidering what he can build."
Burton said the first real building at his complex will be a fitness and aquatics center, a $30 million facility that he said could be up and running in less than two years.
Bobby Ukrop, a former grocery store magnate who is the president of the Sports Backers board of directors, said Sports- Quest didn't help or hinder his plans for an Olympic-caliber pool project he's heading in eastern Chesterfield. That project is already well under way and is scheduled to open in February.
"We were told they'd be up and running a year ago," said Ukrop, the head of the Greater Richmond Aquatic Partnership, which is building a multipool facility adjacent to the Richmond Kickers soccer complex just off Chippenham Parkway at Iron Bridge Road.
People connected to the area's top amateur swimming program, NOVA of Virginia Aquatics, in western Henrico County, said they weren't concerned, either. The bulk of their membership, they said, lived within an easy drive of their pool, which is on Gayton Road near John Rolfe Parkway.
* * * * *
Spend an hour with Burton, and he'll talk his way into and out of any problem. And for all the naysayers, plentiful as they are, he can point to at least a touch of success.
He has his fields, he has a variety of off-site venues and, since this fall, he has a residential sports academy.
It's not the 75- to 150-student school he envisioned last spring, nor the 750-resident, 750-commuter supercampus he hopes to create. But it is two dozen or so actual students, living in town and combining classroom work and basketball training.
They pay up to $40,000 each per year to pursue what Burton labeled a "passion" for their sport.
"This is really people who are more passionate about things, who want to try to extend their basketball career," Burton said. "Oak Hill," a private school in far western Virginia that is known for its A-list basketball players, "a lot of those guys, they're all focused on the NBA. Our guys, they're passionate about their sport, but it might just simply be a desire to play basketball in college. They might be looking solidly at a [Division III], and that's their goal and no fantasy of ever getting in the NBA."
Right now, those students are living in rented dormitory space at the Independence Golf Club in Chesterfield and practicing at the Richmond Volleyball Club, where Burton rented space for the "San Antonio court," the court from last year's NCAA men's basketball tournament on which the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University played Sweet 16 games.
Standing in the building, Burton gets visibly excited looking at the dark, empty volleyball courts next to his well-lit basketball court and pegs that as a likely next sport for his academy.
"I just want to enrich lives through sports," he said. "That's what this is all about."
Getting there, though, hasn't been easy. Part of it is the economy, part of it is Burton himself — he's the undisputed focus of SportsQuest; minus him, the organization simply doesn't exist — and part of it, he said, is the area.
"I think Richmond has enjoyed the benefits of being a conservative community," he said. "That's why Richmond is what it is. That's why it's a nice place to live. That's why it lives within many of its means. But it also presents one of the challenges when you try to present big vision, because if you're a conservative person, you're more likely to question it than to embrace it. So that presents some challenges in our community, but they're overcomeable.
"Richmond underestimates the value that it brings as a tournament center. Half of the U.S. population could get in a car and be on our campus in a day. That's a huge strategic advantage for tournaments. And we're matched against Disney and they've got Mickey, but all of the teams to go there have to get on a plane and fly. So you will measure your desire to participate in that venue very carefully. Whereas us, you can put your team in a van and be on our campus in four or five hours. You'll come much more often. We don't have some of the challenges of Disney. I don't have to cooperate with all of the Mickey programming."
As for the rest of his campus, Burton is his usual vaguely optimistic self.
He said representatives from at least 17 Olympic sports programs had been to his campus and that he hoped he could land six. BMX bicycle racing and wrestling are two of the six; Burton declined to name the other four.
"We want to be a location for Olympic sports programming development," he said. "That's one part of our platform, and it's an important one."
www2.timesdispatch.com/news/2011/dec/11/tdmain01-sportsquest-still-chasing-goal-ar-1535426/