A 2022 rendering of the soon-to-be-completed Greenwood Sports Park, which will open this fall northwest of the Worthsville Road exit off of Interstate 65.
Daily Journal file photo
Drive southbound into Greenwood on Interstate 65 and you’ll see a cluster of empty baseball fields just as you come up to the Worthsville Road exit.
Those fields will be getting plenty of use come autumn.
Earlier this month, the city of Greenwood announced a partnership with GMB, an organization that runs youth baseball and softball tournaments across eight states, that will bring regular 14-and-under travel tourneys to the new Greenwood Sports Park when it opens this fall.
With eight fields, the complex is expected to be able to host as many as 48 teams for two-day fall tournaments and up to 64 for three-day events in the summer.
GMB has been putting on tournaments since 2010 and currently has more than 5,000 teams participating in its events across Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee and Wisconsin. Though the group already has a presence in Evansville, GMB founder and owner Eric Hooper is excited about the possibilities here in Johnson County.
“It’s a great facility, to start with,” he said of Greenwood Sports Park. “There’s a lot of turf out there, but this is going to be, I think, better than most the way they’ve got it set up. Two quads, full netting, the turf. … This just kind of fit into our region in terms of what we wanted to do as far as the turf, the nice facility. And let’s face it — there’s a ton of teams just right in Indy, and Indy is easy to get to from a lot of cities.”
Hooper says that the overwhelming majority of the teams under the GMB umbrella are “within four or five hours” of Greenwood. He anticipates a slow buildup during the fall since fewer teams are active then, but expects that it won’t take long for the new complex to become a big draw.
“There’ll be people in Dayton, Ohio … that right now, they don’t even know that Greenwood exists,” Hooper said. “So it’ll be us marketing, 150,000 emails, social media — it’ll be word of mouth. … Once people get into it, it’ll just start mushrooming.”
Rob Taggart, the executive director of Greenwood Parks and Recreation, says that several tournament directors were interviewed as potential hosts but Hooper and GMB stood out as the “most aligned with Greenwood’s character.”
“The thing that really stuck out to us from his interview was his confident use of words like ‘families’ and ‘community’ and ‘we want to put on a good product for the city of Greenwood,’” Taggart said. “We knew it was going to be a good fit. He had that right mentality that we were looking for.”
Right now, the arrangement between GMB and Greenwood Sports Park is year to year — the fall tournament schedule is set, and Hooper expects to release the slate for next spring and summer in the coming weeks — but both sides are confident that it will become a long-term partnership that benefits everyone involved.
The baseball and softball games themselves are just one piece of the puzzle. Taggart talked about cross-promotion between all of Greenwood’s recreational entities; for example, enticing visiting teams to check out Freedom Springs. Hooper is working on arrangements with the Indianapolis Indians, among others.
Both are hoping to enhance the overall weekend experience for any family that comes into Greenwood, regardless of how their kids fare on the field.
“The families are spending money to be there, ” Hooper said. “and we want it to be as good of an experience as it can be …(Maybe) they didn’t win the hardware, but they had a great weekend. We want people to walk out of there Sunday afternoon, Sunday night saying that. The coaches, the families and the kids.”
Construction of the 40-acre Greenwood Sports Park started in 2022 and wound up with a price tag of approximately $10 million. A majority of the funds came from a $9 million tax increment financing bond, with the remaining $1 million being paid with park impact fees and operating funds. Park impact fees are collected from each new home built in the city to create and maintain park facilities.
The hope is that the complex will end up paying for itself pretty quickly in the form of outside economic impact. Greenwood mayor Mark Myers says that detailed figures aren’t yet available, but he’s optimistic about what the GMB partnership will help draw to the area.
“Until we see how many tournaments we actually bring in, we won’t know what kind of an economic impact it’s going to put on the city,” he said, “but I believe it’s going to be something significant and very worthwhile for the community.”
In anticipation of the influx of visitors, Myers says he has been in conversations with a number of hoteliers about bringing more high-end lodging to the city. Discussions with one in particular about building a hotel and conference center have hit some snags, but adding one is a top short-term priority for Greenwood.
First up is luring more visiting families to fill those future hotels, and that’s where GMB comes in. The tournaments don’t put Greenwood Sports Park in the same ballpark (pun fully intended) as Westfield’s Grand Park, a sprawling campus that includes 26 diamonds and 31 more multi-purpose fields — but at one-tenth the size, that was never supposed to happen. This was about working to fill a local deficiency. The park and this new partnership with GMB are about providing a quality option on Indy’s southside so that not every young baseball or softball player down here has to go to the northside to find a game.
“We’re not Grand Park. … That’s not who we’re trying to be; that’s not our aspiration,” Taggart said. “We wanted a nice, quality sports park that would represent Greenwood, that’s a good representation of Greenwood standards.”
In Hooper’s estimation, the city accomplished that mission — and that’s why he wanted to set up shop here.
“There was a need for this park, without question,” he said. “Nobody’s going to drive past Greenwood, Indiana to go to anything north of Indy in the coming years, I can tell you that. They don’t need to.”
