The $68 million Virginia Beach Sports Center will open in November 2020, and city leaders expect the planned events to bring in about 41,000 athletes in the first year. Tourism taxes are funding the construction.
The roof and walls of the L-shaped building near the Convention Center are up, and a section of a new surface parking lot on 19th Street at Birdneck Road will open to the public Labor Day week.
Eastern Sports Management, which owns and operates the Virginia Beach Field House in Princess Anne, will manage the 19th Street building.
It will feature an oval-shaped hydraulically banked track that can be raised or lowered to allow runners to maintain their speed on turns. There will be more than 2,200 seats on each side of the track. The city hopes to lure indoor NCAA track and field competitions.
Weekend bookings during the center’s first track season are already sold out, said Nancy Helman, the city’s director of sports marketing.
The sports center also will house 120,000 square feet of space that can be converted into 12 basketball or 24 volleyball courts and can be used for wrestling, gymnastics, field hockey, cheerleading and futsal, a variation of soccer usually played indoors.
“It’s going to be a tremendous boon to our economy,” said Mayor Bobby Dyer.
Stacy Parker, 757-222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com
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