Youth sports fixture to leave longtime indoor site. ‘We’re going to do this right.’
Kentucky Indoor Soccer and Sports, a fixture in the Lexington youth sports community for nearly two decades, recently announced it will be moving from its location off Reynolds Road.
Business owner Richie Walsh said an impasse with the property owner over improvements to the 45,000-square foot building led to the decision to vacate rather than any impact of the coronavirus pandemic shutdown. The improvements sought included replacing the building’s 12-year-old turf.
“We were just hamstrung,” said Walsh, who has run the facility for the last five years, having taken it over from his mother and business co-founder, Mary Lynn Walsh. “We didn’t have the ability to grow here.”
Walsh plans to build or find another space he can invest in and offer the same kind of fast-paced indoor soccer experience that has kept it in business for 18 years. Kentucky Indoor featured two turf fields, 185 feet long and 85 feet wide made of a cushioned turf surface with boards and tempered glass walls like a hockey rink, which kept the ball in play and offered unobstructed views for fans.
Over the past few years, Walsh updated the business with fresh paint, a game room, flat-screen TVs, new scoreboards and an online registration system. If he’s able to find a suitable building, he anticipates opening in four to six months. If he has to build, it will likely be 12 to 14 months, he said.
“The new place is required to be better than the one we’re leaving, not just in condition and being new, but also in being more user-friendly and incorporating some of the ideas that our players over the years have given to us,” Walsh said.
Demand for youth sports space, be it for soccer or any other activity, has exploded over the past decade with facilities such as Tower Hill Sports, Next Level and The Yard springing up in a market that already had Kentucky Indoor, Kentucky Basketball Commission, the Lexington Ice Center & Sports Complex and Champions Sports.
Tower Hill, located in the former Malibu Jack’s location off Todds Road, opened in 2019 and came in direct competition with Kentucky Indoor by offering youth and adult soccer leagues as well as individual and group training.
But Walsh said he found the two were able to peacefully coexist and believes there’s plenty of demand to go around whenever and wherever he reopens. Concerns over the coronavirus provide a window to make it happen. All sports have been shuttered since the pandemic hit in early March and they face a number of restrictions to restart under guidelines Gov. Andy Beshear announced last week.
“The one thing that we’ve got right now is time. We’re not in a rush, and we’re going to do this right,” Walsh said. “We’re going to do it in a way that makes me proud, that makes the soccer community proud and that’s going to get everybody excited about playing again.”
The property is owned by Steve Hupman of Apex Realty. He could not be reached for comment.
One of Kentucky Indoor’s sub-leasees, Operation Athlete, owned by personal trainer Ted Butler, has an agreement to remain in the building, and he’s open to working out a deal with whomever takes over the main contract at 404 Sporting Court.
“I’m in a big holding pattern … I’ll reopen when gyms and fitness centers are allowed to open to the public (June 1),” said Butler, who has been doing video training sessions during the shutdown and individual 1-on-1 workouts with clients such at Jedrick Wills, the Lafayette High School-turned-University of Alabama-turned Cleveland Browns offensive lineman. “We’re definitely going to be in this building all summer. I’ve been assured of that.”
The other tenant, the Lexington Youth Soccer Association, which operates youth and adult leagues and a select soccer club, said it is “exploring opportunities for office space.”
“COVID-19 has made office space not critical, and we have been effectively working at home with no interruption of service,” LYSA president Catherine Carrico said.
Kentucky Indoor’s building opened as part of a now-defunct Soccer Blast franchise in 1999 with Walsh’s mother as its director of member services. Mary Lynn Walsh passed away last month.
It was her ties to the Lexington soccer community as a LYSA/Lexington Football Club board member and referee coordinator that helped bring in hundreds of youth and adult teams hungry to play soccer inside over Central Kentucky’s unfriendly winters.
When Soccer Blast’s finances strained, the relationship between it, Walsh and then-general manager Gordon Parker soured, leading them to walk out and subsequently, along with Walsh’s husband, the late Richard Walsh Sr., to form Kentucky Indoor Soccer and Sports in another building a few miles away off Nicholasville Road. Within a year, Soccer Blast ceased operations and Kentucky Indoor moved into the building.
Since that time, Kentucky Indoor’s uses have included adult and youth soccer leagues and camps, youth football, Lexington Horseman arena football team practices, RC car races and even a cat show.
Richie Walsh said he’s confident he’ll be able to replicate its success somewhere else.
“When you remove the cage of this building from the future of Kentucky Indoor that is a very, very bright thing to do,” Walsh said. “I continually locked the business into this location in my own mental box, and what I have realized is that the future is so much brighter outside of this facility than it ever was going to be inside of this facility.”
