LakePoint offers travel-sports vacation experience

The $1 billion LakePoint complex sits just north of Atlanta. Photo by: LAKEPOINT

Just north of Atlanta, a $1 billion baseball complex rises out of the red Georgia clay. And it’s not the future home of the Braves.

In fact, LakePoint is more than the home to some of the best youth baseball in the country. It’s a full-fledged sporting community with venues for wakeboarding, football, basketball, lacrosse, soccer, sand volleyball and indoor volleyball, all in about 200 acres just off I-75 north, 35 miles from downtown Atlanta.

This is just the start. LakePoint’s private owners are less than a third of the way from developing all 1,400 acres they own.

A massive 170,000-square-foot indoor facility for basketball and volleyball just opened and has already hosted national events, including basketball tournaments run by Adidas, Under Armour and the AAU.

Eventually, LakePoint’s footprint will be the site for 12 multipurpose fields, 23 baseball fields, a golf course, 32 tennis courts, more than 20 hotels, 50 restaurants, a Bass Pro Shops location and several more retail options.

“We had seen this amazing growth in an industry — youth sports — that wasn’t being served well,” said Neal Freeman, LakePoint’s president and a real estate developer who used to coach travel baseball and softball. “Youth sports have been so fragmented, but we wanted to deliver something different. We wanted to give families a vacation experience while they’re playing travel sports.”

On a recent humid summer afternoon, all eight of LakePoint’s current baseball fields were busy hosting a Perfect Game tournament, former Baltimore Ravens quarterback Trent Dilfer was a few hundred yards away instructing young signal-callers, and teenage girls were competing on the sand volleyball courts, just a stone’s throw from the wakeboarding facility.

Many of the young athletes and their families stay at the Hampton Inn, one of the two new hotels on the LakePoint property, paying $165 a night, $7 to wash and dry a load of clothes, $55 for a tournament pass and $5 to park at the baseball complex. Reminders are everywhere that this is a for-profit venture.

Fast-food restaurants and other businesses riding LakePoint’s coattails have started to pop up within the facility’s footprint, giving bustle and commerce to this once-sleepy exit in Emerson, Ga., that used to be home to a Love’s truck stop and little else.

Four more hotels are about to begin construction and within the next few years the property will be the site for a water park, bowling, zip lines and ropes courses.

“My dream is that one day as many people will come to LakePoint for their vacation as they do to play baseball,” Freeman said.

But at its core, LakePoint is a place for elite-level youth athletes to compete and train. That’s the heart of the business for LakePoint, whose early investors three years ago included former Braves managers Bobby Cox and Fredi Gonzalez, as well as Kansas City Royals chief Ned Yost.

LakePoint includes a $35 million indoor basketball and volleyball facility that opened in May. Photo by: LAKEPOINT

The operators are counting on the travel sports craze to support the facility. They should know. Many of them, like Freeman, were youth sports parents and coaches before, and that still links many of them today. It’s what motivates them to deliver a better experience to those families who routinely spend their summer vacations at a baseball showcase, basketball tournament or soccer event.

By the end of 2016, LakePoint projects 1.6 million people — ballplayers, their families, coaches and others — will pass through its gates.

“We’re not just building a lot of fields,” said Michael Grade, senior vice president of operations and the chief event recruiter for LakePoint. “We want it to be a destination. On-the-field is the easiest part. We’ve pretty much got that on cruise control now. … But we want to do something special and something that would be difficult to duplicate. There’s a cost to that.”

LakePoint has made some adjustments over the last two years since it opened. The original plan called for more baseball fields, hotels and restaurants. But sparing no expense, like Musco LED lights and Shaw Sports Turf’s synthetic surfaces, comes with a cost. The owners are seeking another round of investments as construction soon begins on the next phase.

The revenue streams, meanwhile, have been steady.

Perfect Game and other event promoters pay fees to rent the fields. LakePoint benefits from concessions, parking, merchandise, hotel rebates and running some of its own events.

The list of sponsors includes many companies that have a stake in the success of the park. Coca-Cola, for example, pays a sponsorship fee and in exchange owns pouring rights across the facility. Its marks also are on the scoreboards.

Kia came on board as a sponsor to introduce its brand to the young audience at LakePoint.

“If we can get a first-time driver to physically see and experience the product, our conversion rate goes exponentially higher,” said Vince Thompson, CEO and chairman at Atlanta agency Melt, which helped sell LakePoint deals to Kia and Coca-Cola. “I see a lot of potential, given the enormity of the property, to expand Kia’s footprint with activities such as ride-and-drives that really allow the youth to experience the car. It’s a lot easier than trying to lure a teen into a dealership.”

While the park has been open since 2014, the story of LakePoint goes back much longer.

After the 2008 real estate collapse, Freeman often found himself hunting for bargains and there were plenty to be had. The 1,400 acres at LakePoint originally were going to be an industrial park before the property went back to the bank.

About the same time, Freeman was introduced to Earl Ehrhart, a Georgia state representative and former travel baseball coach who longed to create a unique youth sports venue. They jointly worked on a vision for LakePoint, which sits next to Lake Allatoona, and then started raising the money.

There were 84 original investors who put up the $26 million to buy the land. The development has been executed with private funds, except for public money to redirect some roads and a public-private partnership to build the $35 million indoor facility on the south campus.

The mostly complete south campus, at about 200 acres, now features eight full-size baseball fields, three multipurpose fields, wakeboarding, beach volleyball and the indoor facility for volleyball and basketball.

Ground will soon break on the 800 acres comprising the north campus, where several more fields, tennis courts, a Greg Norman 12-hole par-3 golf course, and a track and field stadium with seating for 6,500 will open in two years.

“The fields became like the ocean and the beachfront property became the hotels, restaurants, entertainment and retail around it,” Freeman said. “This wasn’t initially a sports play. It was just a chance to get the land at a magnificently low price because of the timing. Now we think we’ve got the premier sports vacation destination.”