Photos taken by Virginia Beach Staff Week of May 4th
Despite the current working environment nationwide, the folks down in Virginia Beach are keeping construction of the new Virginia Beach Sports Center not only on schedule but ahead of schedule! This track complex will play host to numerous large invitationals and championship meets starting in December of 2020.
The biggest championship meet we currently know will be the VHSL Class 5/6 State Championships.
Construction began on the Sports Center in July of 2018 and by July of 2019 the building had been built and finishes began to be installed. With indoor tracks though, especially those using a poured in surface (Beynon in this case) the track must be installed last to ensure a clean and perfect surface. Now with nearly all facets of the building done, the track material is being poured onto the new banked surface.
The facility itself will be 70,500 square feet on the track side with 12 basketball courts on the adjoining side. Between the two will be a two-story mezzanine with concessions, meeting rooms, and overhangs with bleacher seats. There will also be 4,500 permanent seats on the track side which is significantly more than Boo Williams or Liberty who both have around 1,500 for track events.
Per Virginia Beach's staff, the facility is still on target to be finished in the Summer of 2020 with ample time for system testing and staging practice before the opening of the facility to track invitationals the first weekend in December. Virginia Beach is also already preparing for what could be a new-normal with many hand sanitizing stations and other preventative measures to help the spread of infectious viruses/diseases.
The official schedule has yet to be released but MileStat was able to dig out some key insights. There are 13 viable weekends indoors this year and we were able to find out there are three high school or club invitationals in December, three high school invitationals in January, and a combination high school and college invitational in February. We expect three additional weekends to be slated for college conference and VHSL state meets. That brings the total to 10 weekend meets. The finalized schedule is supposed to be released in the coming weeks. We do know that every weekend was fully booked months in advance.
It is very much expected to also hold some major NCAA meets in the near future but without the final schedule it would just be speculation to list them here.