Swing will have 80 courts and space for Wilson Sporting Goods’ innovation lab. Bret McCormick
The sheer of the Swing Racquet + Paddle campus (45 acres) and the investment ($80 million) deployed to bring it to life is impressive, but the involvement of Wilson Sporting Goods might lend more gravitas to the project than anything else.
Wilson, long synonymous with tennis equipment, inked a long-term partnership with Swing earlier this year. Wilson will move a portion of its corporate staff from Chicago to the Swing campus, while also standing up a research and development lab, a stringing bar — where Swing guests can get rackets restrung by pros — and a retail space that will feature apparel from the direct-to-consumer apparel business Wilson launched two years ago, the company’s first such store located outside of Chicago, Los Angeles or New York.
“It will be a terrific integration platform for Wilson, and to have one of the premier racket good technology companies in the world choose to make their innovation HQ at Swing’s flagship is tremendous,” said Octagon founder and president Phil de Picciotto, who has invested in Swing and helped the company make connections in the tennis world. “It adds another layer of uniqueness and seriousness, even beyond the players’ side. It’s a destination for the future and further development of the sport.”
Jason Collins, global general manager for Wilson Racquet Sports, said the development, design, product, and grassroots divisions will move from the company’s headquarters in Chicago to the new location in Raleigh; in other words, the people that Wilson needs to be closest to athletes. The deal is the first of its type for Wilson and goes well beyond signage or brand awareness.
“The hub allows us to have real-time feedback in engaging with consumers,” Collins said. “There aren’t many people that don’t know about Wilson already. For us, it’s the interaction with athletes that’s critical.”
There tends to be an innovation-type concept to every business these days, and Swing’s ambition and the steps they’ve taken so far is to be the tech/innovation hub for racket sports, said de Picciotto, a theme that’s perfect for Swing’s location amid the tech-heavy Research Triangle that includes the University of North Carolina, N.C. State and Duke University.
Swing founder and CEO Rob Autry said earlier this year that the company was pursuing multimedia and tech partners, too. Cole Wilson, Swing director of brand development, said a few European companies are considering a partnership like Wilson’s to gain exposure in American markets, and that Swing is looking less for traditional sponsorship deals — dollars for eyeballs — but rather to partner with brands that have synergistic goals, like a vested interest in growing racket sports.
