AT&T Sports Center pursues non-profit status

MAT-SU — If all goes according to plan, current members of the AT&T Sports Center won’t even notice when a nonprofit organization takes over the facility.

“It is our desire both with the current ownership and with Community Sports that this will be a seamless acquisition,” said Gretchen Giest, executive director of Community Sports Inc., the nonprofit seeking to take ownership of the facility.

But while members who work out there won’t notice, for the sports center and Community Sports Inc., it’s a very big deal, mostly because Valley nonprofits working to rent the facility will find it easier to do so.

“We will be able to break down the barriers of non-profit use to the center,” Giest said. “It changes the dynamic.”

The facility was opened in 2008, but even before then, Geist said the idea had been to create a place for community members to exercise and to practice and play court-based sports. The non-profit model seemed like the way to go. The problem then, she said, was in the funding. There just wasn’t any money available for this kind of project.

“The funding was not able to be secured, it had never been done before,” Geist said. “This is the first complex of its type in the state.”

So the organizers formed a corporation, Double B LLC, brought in a large private donation, combined it with a loan from Alaska USA Federal Credit Union, and went with a for-profit model. But the nonprofit idea was still there. Now that AT&T Sports Center has been open for three years, it has proven it is a sustainable endeavor, Geist says in a press release.

In much the same way that Double B was formed to take on the sports center, Community Sports Inc. was established to eventually take it over. In the intervening years, Community Sports has started a number of programs such as a scholarship that allows kids seeking to participate in youth sports to work off their fees to those organizations through volunteerism, and a night basketball program with adult volunteers helping kids who want to play from 9 p.m. to midnight.

In order to put together a plan for how to take over, Community Sports secured a $75,000 grant from the Mat-Su Health Foundation this year. It’s going to need a lot more before the transition can be complete, so the project is now in the fund-raising stage.

Community Sports has begun the process of putting together an impartial appraisal of the facility. Until that appraisal is complete, it’s not clear exactly how much money Community Sports will need to raise.

In her press release, Geist notes that the final sale price will be less than was originally invested in the project. The idea there is to ensure that nobody makes a profit off of this process.

When it’s all said and done, she said, what the Valley should expect to see is the same sports complex they’ve come to know, but just more of it.

“There will be more programs available to the community once the acquisition is finalized,” Geist said. “This acquisition is going to give the Valley the opportunity to be active and healthy in an affordable manner.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.