Rapid City’s planned youth sports complex has its financing largely in place. What it has now is a deadline.
Domico Rodriguez, executive director of the Rapid City Sports Commission, said the land donated for the project comes with an expiration date of Dec. 31, 2029. Miss it, and the property reverts to the donor.
“We’ve got to get something done by then,” Rodriguez said on the Rapid City Business Journal podcast.
The donor is Pete Lien & Sons, which agreed to give the city 22.65 acres on the north side of Rapid City. The City Council advanced the donation in July.
Rodriguez laid out a funding structure for a complex he put in the range of $74 million to $77 million. The largest share comes from the hospitality industry, which implemented a second hotel business improvement district fee of $2 per room per night. He said that fee accounts for roughly $20 million up front and will total about $28 million over 20 years. The city’s Vision Fund is contributing $5 million, with tax increment financing making up roughly $20 million more.
“So the public is not paying for any of this,” Rodriguez said, drawing a line between the sports complex and the separate Libertyland entertainment district proposal. Rapid City voters rejected a $125 million tax increment financing district tied to Libertyland earlier this year.
“Again, separate from Libertyland,” he said. “Let’s just be that clear.”
At the time of the interview, Rodriguez said the project had secured a naming rights sponsor but stopped short of identifying it. The city announced Aug. 6 that Sanford Health had signed on, a partnership valued at $10 million over 20 years.
“They have been extremely successful in the Sioux Falls and Fargo markets, and we are excited to partner with them on this project,” Rodriguez said in the city’s announcement.
Mayor Jason Salamun said the agreement “brings valuable experience and a shared commitment to creating a first-class facility that will serve our youth, residents, and visitors for generations to come.”
Rodriguez said some fundraising remains for site work and infrastructure, the kind of spending that does not add visible value but has to happen. City officials have said more than $66 million is now secured across the hotel fee, the tax increment district, the land donation, Vision Fund dollars and the naming rights deal.
On timing, Rodriguez said one of the companies that bid on construction believes October 2028 is a reasonable target if the City Council keeps things moving. The building itself is not complicated.
“It is not a very extravagant or intricate building,” he said. The engineering challenge is circulating people and air through roughly 200,000 square feet.
The case for the facility, Rodriguez said, rests on a study the commission commissioned from Sports Facilities Companies within weeks of the organization’s founding in February 2023. The firm counted athletes across the region and recommended an indoor facility as the top priority, because indoor sports draw from the widest pool. Rodriguez estimated the study identified roughly 45,000 kids in the region participating in volleyball, basketball, wrestling, indoor soccer, taekwondo and martial arts, though he noted he was working from memory on the figure.
“This is not us speaking this,” he said. “This is money we paid to bring somebody in to look at us.”
Sports Facilities Companies is slated to operate the building once it opens.
Rodriguez pushed back on a common assumption: that the complex duplicates Summit Arena at The Monument. He called that a misconception.
“We are a youth sports facility,” he said. “They are a ticketed, seated, you know, 5,000-plus facility. We don’t have that.”
He said the two venues would work in tandem rather than compete, pointing to events like the Lakota Nation Invitational that already stretch across school gyms and every available court in town. A dedicated youth facility would give visiting teams somewhere to practice before competition.
The economic argument turns on weekends. Rodriguez said the complex would add eight to 10 weekends of visitors, with particular value in winter, when Black Hills tourism thins out.
“We are a huge regional hub. We’re on an island,” he said. “And so people have to come here to do shopping and all the different things.”
Anyone skeptical that youth tournaments move money can check Rushmore Crossing on a soccer weekend, a point co-host Shiloh Francis raised after struggling to find parking there.
Rodriguez said the goal is also to keep local families from spending that money elsewhere. He estimated a family traveling regionally for a weekend tournament spends about $1,000 by the time they get home, and said his own two kids play travel sports.
“There’s a large chunk of the population that cannot,” he said of affording that travel. “So if we can create something here locally, then maybe more kids that need it and need that structure can do it here versus not being able to participate at all.”
Rodriguez said what distinguishes Rapid City from other markets is that youth sports here run on volunteers rather than municipal recreation departments.
“Where I grew up, the city ran a lot of this programming,” he said. “These would not exist without volunteer parents. It’s kind of the fiber of how sports operate.”
He acknowledged tradeoffs in that model, mainly that parent-run leagues have to raise fees to cover costs a city might absorb. “So the wheel is not perfect, but we’re very successful with the setup that we have.”
Rodriguez, who was born in Kansas City and raised in Denver, came to South Dakota to play football and run track at Black Hills State University and moved to Rapid City in 2006. He worked for what is now Visit Rapid City beginning in 2010 before the sports commission launched in February 2023.
He framed the last three years as slow work finally surfacing. He said he and Visit Rapid City CEO Brooke Kaufman had talked about it recently at a conference.
“This is truly the long game,” he said. “Three years of working on this. And finally, we’re getting somewhere. It didn’t just happen overnight.”
Hear the full conversation with Domico Rodriguez on the Rapid City Business Journal podcast, hosted by Murdoc and Shiloh Francis.
