McMahon proposes $25M soccer, lacrosse complex to attract regional sports tourism

Hopkins Road Park

Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon has proposed building a $25 million tournament-quality soccer and lacrosse complex at Hopkins Road Park in Salina. (Rick Moriarty | rmoriarty@syracuse.com)

Salina, N.Y. — Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon on Tuesday proposed building a $25 million soccer and lacrosse complex in Salina that a consultant said would attract 500,000 people a year.

The new sports complex would generate business for nearby hotels and restaurants, whose owners fear they’ll be hurt by the upcoming relocation of Interstate 81, McMahon said.

Ten tournament-quality fields, including one indoors, would be built at Hopkins Road Park, a 63-acre, county-owned site with five softball fields and one baseball field. Youth and adult teams from throughout the Northeast would be invited to tournaments at the complex.

“Sports tourism is a huge marketplace, and we’re in the center of the state,” McMahon said. “We’re within a three- and four-hour drive of every major metropolitan market in the Northeast, including Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. So this is a huge opportunity.”

The softball and baseball diamonds at Hopkins Road Park would be replaced by soccer and lacrosse fields and relocated elsewhere in the county, possibly to DeWitt’s softball and baseball complex at Carrier Park, he said. McMahon said he will propose including $2 million in next year’s county budget to relocate the softball and baseball fields.

Sports complex

Proposed site plan for a $25 million soccer and lacrosse sports complex at Hopkins Road Park in Salina. (Courtesy of CHA)

The soccer and lacrosse fields would be made of synthetic turf and would be lighted for nighttime play. One would have 1,500 bleacher seats.

McMahon is proposing to pay for the complex using federal stimulus aid the county is receiving to offset revenue losses from the coronavirus pandemic. A management firm would be sought to operate the facility.

If the county Legislature approves of the plan, engineering work would start this year and construction would take place in 2022, with the first tournaments taking place as early as fall next year. The first full season of tournaments would happen in 2023, McMahon said.

McMahon said Conventions Sports & Leisure International Inc., a Minneapolis-based sports, entertainment, convention and leisure industry consultant hired by the county, estimated that by the facility’s fourth year of operation, it would:

  • Generate $20 million in direct spending annually
  • Fill 31,000 hotel rooms a year
  • Create the equivalent of 400 full-time direct and spin-off jobs
  • Annually generate more than $1 million in sales and hotel room-tax revenues for the county and another $1 million in tax revenue for the state

Of the 500,000 people a year the consultant estimated the complex would attract, 144,000 would be from outside Central New York, he said.

Hopkins Road complex

Rendering shows a portion of a proposed $25 million soccer and lacrosse complex at Onondaga County's Hopkins Road Park in Salina. (Courtesy of CHA)

When he first proposed the idea of building a regional sports complex two years ago, McMahon considered locations near Onondaga Lake, including the county-owned former Roth Steel scrapyard site off Hiawatha Boulevard in Syracuse. But a lakefront complex would have to be split among more than one property, which would detract from its appeal as a tournament site, he said.

In addition, having the complex in Salina would help offset economic losses that hotels and restaurants in Salina could experience when the state redirects I-81 from downtown Syracuse to Interstate 481, he said.

Owners of a cluster of hotels along Seventh North Street and Buckley Road, close to I-81, have said they fear they will lose business when traffic diverted to I-481 bypasses them.

“Doing it right there in Salina is going to really help those businesses being impacted from the 81 project and it’s going to give Syracuse and others another tool in their toolbox to land more events,” said McMahon.

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