Grace College Sport Management Program Director and Assistant Athletic Director Carol McGregor, center is the back row, poses for a photo with her sport management students after the Kosciusko County Parks and Recreation Board meeting Thursday. Photo by David Slone, Times-Union.

By David Slone
Times-Union

WARSAW — It took four Kosciusko Leadership Academy white paper projects over 26 years before an ice skating rink in Kosciusko County was realized.

A new, big project was presented Thursday to the Kosciusko County Parks and Recreation Board.

Grace College Assistant Athletic Director and Sport Management Program Director Carol McGregor presented the “Fieldhouse of Dreams,” a community fieldhouse that is the topic of the white paper project her KLA team is working on. Her team members for the fieldhouse are Chad Hummel, Silveus Insurance; Denny Harlan, city of Warsaw; and Angie Summers, K21 Health Foundation.

McGregor read to the board a description that was given at a KLA meeting about the Hoosier Enduring Legacy Program and the call for community centers for wellness  programming.

“It says the smaller communities lack indoor exercise options from late fall to early spring months. This initiative was to support the planning, implementation, building or renovation of indoor facilities in our local towns,” she said. The indoor facilities may be part of a renovation or construction of new facilities that “would allow local communities access to exercise options that provide a safe space for both activity and social engagement around exercise. These structures would be used as convenient socialization opportunities centered around movement while providing a variety of health programming for the smaller communities. This would provide year-round access to health center programming and affordable options in convenient locations for all of Kosciusko County.”

Even as a college administrator, McGregor said, facilities are “lacking. I’m sure we feel it within our communities, too, as it says, from that late fall to the early spring months of where can we go, what can we do and how can we continually be active and healthy without those resources within our county.”

An organization called AGAITAS provides free soccer, baseball and basketball camps for kids. McGregor asked, “What could they do and what kind of impact could they have amongst the community members if they had access to a facility all year?”

McGregor works in Kosciusko County but lives in Fort Wayne and she has access there to turf facilities and gyms that are “outstanding.” However, she said, her KLA team members live in Kosciusko and don’t have the same access without driving 45 minutes away to give their children the opportunity to play indoor soccer during the winter months.

“We wanted to just look at how can we build something or bridge the gap that we’re lacking here,” she said.

The first of three questions she had when she previously met with Parks Board member Matt Metzger was: What does the community want? That’s a question she understood the board also was investigating.

“So that’s one of the areas we want to come along side you,” she said, and maybe propose an idea.

She said they know fitness and activity is huge in the connectivity within the county. “Ideally, this facility would end up being located in the Warsaw/Winona Lake area. We do have other communities reaching out, doing some KEDCO, getting the HELP grants.” The community fieldhouse would serve as a home base for students from all over the county, McGregor continued.

The second question she presented was on the cost of the fieldhouse.

She presented a quote from The Farley Group for a 100,000-square-foot dome for about $3.6 million in construction costs. There would be an additional cost for turf or whatever flooring was desired. She said it was a “much cheaper” option in regards to upfront costs, but ongoing costs were more than a brick-and-mortar building.

The Turnstone Plassman Athletic Center in Fort Wayne is 128,796 square feet and cost about $14.5 million. It includes a 200-meter track with six full lanes and in the interior are four full-size basketball courts.  They have space for storage and have a scoreboard, a hot water pool and a fitness center. Though the initial cost for such a facility is high, she said Turnstone brings in over 80,000 visitors a year to Fort Wayne with the tournaments they host, which adds $15.5 million in visitor spending.

McGregor said she spoke with the Turnstone facility manager who indicated to her that the first three years they brought in $60,000 in profit, though they are a not-for-profit. Now that Turnstone has been in operation for nearly a decade, she said, they make about $250,000 in profit from events they host and leasing out the facilities.

The final question she presented was, who would the partners be on the facility? McGregor said not only would Grace College be interested in it because of its students, but also hospital systems, the parks and foundations.

“So, in summary, the biggest question that we still kind of have, that we have to look upon, is the location. Where would we want it? Where would we have the best access? Where could people capitalize on it? Where are they willing to get their fitness on?” McGregor said.

The next steps for the KLA team is to continue with its survey and progress through there, she said, getting more information to create a “playbook” on how to move forward with the fieldhouse.

Metzger said the county park board has to think about being countywide, so when it comes to location of the fieldhouse he wondered where would it sit. He said he knows there’s potentially a place on the east side of Grace’s campus. McGregor said that location would provide connectivity to the trails.

Parks Board member Mike Cusick asked if the county parks department and board would be a partner in the development and funding of the fieldhouse. McGregor said yes to all of the above.

“We’re trying to piece together who was most invested and who would want to see this come to fruition and get the right people connected and sitting at this table together. To go ahead and brave this plan together. It is a challenge to say, ‘Hey! This is exactly what it’s going to be.’ But we have some success and one easy example that I can use is the Health & Wellness Center. With that being established, and opening up to community members … from my understanding, especially through K21, it’s been a healthy relationship to allow those 60-plus to get in with their memberships to have access to the weight room and facility and even using the gymnasium in there. So it’s looking at those partnerships and trying to figure it out,” McGregor explained.

Metzger said the project is in its infancy stage, but it’s one that makes sense for the county parks board to come along side as such projects are what the community said they wanted to see in recent surveys.

McGregor said there’s a lot of details they don’t have to figure out right now. “But we just need to be able to kind of say there’s people very interested in doing this  and there’s people that want to come along side,” she said.