WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — A giant retaining wall grows, one gray cement block at a time, above the Silas Creek that snakes through Wake Forest and the bank of stadiums that houses Demon Deacon football, basketball and baseball.
An erector site rises from a pile of dry brown clay in the shadow of Allegacy Federal Credit Union Stadium. An intersection will soon disappear. The campus landscape shifts by the day.
Soon, an area that was once an expanse of open asphalt and abandoned buildings will be 100 bustling acres of restaurants, retail, condos, apartments and student housing. When the $250 million project opens by the fall of 2027, Wake Forest hopes The Grounds will be a shining example of the latest craze in college sports facilities.
Mixed-use stadium districts.
“It’s really about driving the economic vitality of Winston-Salem and Wake Forest,” athletic director John Currie said.
That goal has taken on greater importance in the revenue-sharing and NIL era. Now that schools are legally paying players, they’re searching every couch cushion — or underused parcel of land — for new income streams. Plopping 50,000 square feet of shops next to an arena might not lead to a transformational payday, but if it generates a couple million dollars in passive revenue, that’s a few million dollars that can buy a quarterback or buy out a coach.
But the vision is also grander. Schools are taking parking lots and eyesores and developing them into districts where people live, work or play — ideally all three — beyond six or seven home games a year. The details depend on everything from the town’s demographics to the area’s topography, but the possibilities and, yes, revenues are intriguing enough that 20-some schools are constructing or at least considering them, from Tennessee and Oklahoma to New Mexico and Cleveland State.
The first building at Iowa State’s $200 million CyTown will open in the next year, while Kansas expects its Gateway District to be ready in 2028. South Florida hasn’t even finished its 35,000-seat on-campus stadium yet but already plans to connect it to restaurants, housing and a hotel/conference center on the site of an old golf course.
It’s a model inspired by entertainment districts around professional stadiums in cities like Atlanta and Milwaukee. At the college level, schools risk spoiling game-day traditions as they inch closer to their professional peers. But the reward is maximizing revenue in an era where every penny matters while adding a vibrant space that transcends sports for students, athletes and locals.
“It’s the next evolution of the arms race for athletic-specific facilities that we’ve seen,” said former UCF quarterback Kyle Israel, co-founder of the investment/real estate group Momentous Sports. “This is just taking one step outside of that.”
The ongoing work to build “The Grounds,” a mixed-use development at Wake Forest that is scheduled to be ready for the 2027 football season. (David Ubben / The Athletic)
The calculus for colleges
The best way to understand the mixed-use trend brewing in college sports is, as usual, to look to the pros. If you watched last year’s NFL Draft, you saw fans packing Green Bay’s Titletown. IndyCar drivers sped past the Rangers’ Texas Live! entertainment hub and hotel this spring. The Milwaukee Bucks’ Deer District will host a pop-punk concert headlined by Yellowcard this month.
The paragon of mixed-use development remains The Battery, which the Atlanta Braves opened in 2017. Its blend of offices, restaurants, shops and events — oh, and also baseball — has attracted so many patrons (and so much revenue) that other pro franchises want their own.
The calculus isn’t much different for schools with big brands, prominent venues and a promising plot of nearby land.
“All those ingredients are there at dozens of universities,” said RVX Ventures principal Nick Benjamin, who worked on MLB projects in Texas and St. Louis and is developing Tennessee’s Neyland Entertainment District. “There’s an obvious opportunity for schools to grow, for the community to grow and for the university to take advantage of the brand equity that they’ve built.”
These areas have a few ways to turn that brand equity into cash. The Seminole Boosters essentially act as landlords for Florida State’s College Town: About $3 million in rent funnels from businesses to the boosters to FSU athletics every year. At Tennessee, term sheets guarantee the school $750,000 in base rent from a planned condotel (180 hotel rooms plus 80 condos) and another $750,000 from the entertainment area.
Iowa State expects most of CyTown’s direct money to come from two buckets. One is a revenue-sharing system that gives the school a slice of the developer’s profits. The other is an acronym — Payment In Lieu Of Property Taxes, or PILOT — that’s less complicated than it sounds. Because the university-owned land is exempt from property taxes, tenants will take what they would have paid in taxes and send it to the school. Those two sources will account for 80 percent of the $184 million the school expects to make over 30 years, according to a board of regents presentation in December.
Although the sticker prices seem high — $268 million at USF, $1 billion at Oklahoma — the financial liabilities and costs generally lie with developers, not schools. Tennessee’s on the hook for less than 25 percent of its $368 million project (and almost all of its share is for a parking garage). Iowa State isn’t constructing or financing the buildings but ultimately owns them; athletic director Jamie Pollard said those assets could be worth almost $500 million to the university when the 30-year agreement ends.
New spaces give schools new opportunities to be creative, beyond selling naming rights to a plaza. Could a company sponsor a mural or sculpture so its corporate logo appears in every Instagram post from a visiting fan or prospective student?
The indirect benefits have already started for the Cyclones. After the Cyclones hired a company to schedule events for the project’s amphitheater, conversations evolved into shows at Jack Trice Stadium. Country music star Luke Combs performed last month, while Post Malone and Jelly Roll are coming in July.
“We went from having zero concerts in the stadium to having two to three a year,” Pollard said.
Each show nets the Cyclones about $1 million.
The Battery, the area outside the Atlanta Braves’ stadium, has become the paragon for mixed-use developments in sports. (Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
Beyond game day
Years before The Battery broke ground or rev-sharing caused a budget crunch, Florida State faced an issue that’s less relevant in the pros but crucial to the Seminoles’ business model: How do you convince a spread-out fan base to keep traveling 150-plus miles to games amid a nationwide attendance dip?
Then-boosters president Andy Miller’s answer: “It’s the experience.”
To make the experience better, the boosters looked a couple blocks past Doak Campbell Stadium to a run-down clump of warehouses. The neighborhood wasn’t just blighted with a barred-up liquor store; it was dangerous (a World War II-era bomb was unearthed in 2016).
“Not an area you would visit after the sun went down,” FSU alumnus Matt Thompson said.
But that area was plopped between Doak and the basketball arena, so it checked the three boxes of real estate — location, location, location. The Seminole Boosters used endowment funds on a three-phase development that added a hotel, student housing, dining and retail. The revenue was important, but so was the tie-in to the core business of football. By adding a thriving entertainment zone a few blocks from Doak, boosters hoped they’d improve the experience enough to keep fans coming regardless of FSU’s record or opponent.
There are too many variables to show a clear cause and effect on attendance and donor contributions. But College Town has become a part of the backdrop to FSU sports, down to the spear sculpture planted on the sidewalk. Hotel Indigo hosts NIL meet-and-greets. The Friday night block party rocks with performances by the marching band, country musicians and rock groups.
Coaches hold their regular shows at one restaurant, Bowden’s, while recruits often dine at another, Madison Social, on official visits. Thompson, managing partner of For The Table Hospitality, said football weekends drive 20 percent of Madison Social’s business.
Here’s the surprising part — one that’s critical to understanding the scope of these spaces: Thompson’s busiest month isn’t during football season.
It’s April.
“Always has been,” Thompson said.
That’s chiefly a product of soon-to-be graduates enjoying their final few weeks in Tallahassee along with out-of-towners coming for baseball, softball and campus tours. But it’s also a reflection of how schools and developers plan and activate mixed-use areas.
“You cannot look at yourself solely as a sports destination,” said Trent Michels, the managing director of investments at the investment/real estate group Momentous Sports.
Instead, sports are merely a starting place — and not the only one.
Student housing provides an obvious entry point, but occupancy ebbs and flows based on the academic calendar. Apartments or condos provide a buffer when class is out of session; one of the units at Wake Forest was bought by someone with no ties to the school at all.
The first building to open at CyTown will be a medical clinic. With 150 employees plus 800-900 daily appointments, it’ll attract 1,000 people to the area — 1,000 people who might also grab lunch at a cafe or buy shoes at a shop. A massive playground could make the zone a destination for families with kids, just as Currie envisions parents with strollers roaming The Grounds’ green space.
Between Vols football, basketball, baseball and softball, Tennessee’s district has dozens of built-in events to draw shoppers and diners.
“But there’s 200 other days a year we’ll program consistently on our side to drive folks there,” said Sean Decker, who’s involved in the project as an RVX Principal.
Decker envisions watch parties for away games and popular TV shows. The hotel can host conferences and business meetings. Concerts and comedians are obvious options, along with events to complement whatever festivals or youth sports tournaments Knoxville is hosting.
Success, Decker said, “looks like creating the center of gravity in a market.”
This, too, comes back to the core business — not just for the athletic department but for the university as a whole. As schools face the headwinds of online classes and a demographic cliff that threatens enrollment, a buzzing mixed-use space is one way to help attract students to campus and, hopefully, keep them there. Iowa State’s admissions office is already planning how to maximize the state high school basketball tournament when it moves from Des Moines to CyTown next year.
“We’re not recruiting the players on the court,” Pollard said. “We’re recruiting the kids in the stands.”
The vision for the Neyland Entertainment District outside Tennessee’s stadium. (Screengrab from Tennessee Board of Trustees executive committee meeting)
Risk vs. reward
As the Neyland Entertainment District snakes through the approval process toward the beginning of construction in July, Tennessee board of trustees chairperson John Compton has heard from three sets of Vols fans.
The first camp is all-in. The second approves but has questions or suggestions.
“The third camp is, ‘Don’t do this at all,’” Compton said during a committee meeting last week. “That’s born out of the tradition and history that Neyland Stadium has had on that river.”
Therein lies the biggest issue Kennesaw State economics professor J.C. Bradbury sees with these projects: change.
North Carolina’s plan to build a new basketball arena and adjacent mixed-use district a few miles north of the Dean Dome stalled amidst public backlash. The Tar Heels are an extreme example — the Vols and Demon Deacons aren’t moving their stadium — but the same nostalgic pull applies elsewhere. Do out-of-town alumni want new hot spots, or do they want to return to the same dive bars they frequented when they were 21? How will fans feel if their traditional tailgating lot is replaced by something that feels like a sterile strip mall with a Shake Shack and yet another cellphone shop?
“The danger is if you make it something where it doesn’t seem organic or authentic to that alumni experience, you may dampen it … ” said Bradbury, who studies the economic impact of sports venues. “If you blow that, then someone gets sick of going to games.”
Which means there’s a chance an idea intended to help the core business actually hurts it.
Schools pursuing these zones have other concerns to consider, too, like reputational harm if a high-profile plot of land looks like a ghost town.
“What we don’t want is empty buildings in the middle of campus,” Pollard said. “That would be bad.”
It takes years for projects to go from abstract concepts to digital designs to concrete structures. Iowa State started exploring CyTown in 2019, while politics and litigation have bogged down an already complex process at Oklahoma. The opportunity cost, then, is significant; administrators must devote a lot of time to make a few million extra bucks a year.
Teams can also misread the market by failing to communicate with fans or leaning too much into retail and restaurants without other reasons to lure visitors.
“There’s a lot of ways to do it right,” Momentous Sports’ Michels said, “and there’s even more ways to do it wrong.”
But when it’s done right, Michels said, the reward can be tremendous.
San Diego State expects to be able to enroll an extra 15,000 students thanks to the growing district anchored by the Aztecs’ four-year-old Snapdragon Stadium. For most mid-level programs, the additional money won’t eliminate the gap with the big brands, but it can shrink it, or at least help keep an Olympic sport afloat. The tailgating scene at Florida State across the street from College Town is still alive with smoking grills and rocking music; Madison Social and its neighbors have simply provided another reason for fans to arrive earlier, stay later and remain engaged with their team.
If sports are the front porch of a university, Wake Forest, Tennessee and their peers will benefit when the walls stop rising, the clay stops shifting and their brand-new mixed-use districts create a walkway to the front porch that is, well, walkable.
“We see this,” Decker said, “as the next evolution of sports.”
