Sports facility owners hopes to begin construction this summer

After nearly three years of planning, organizing, replanning and reorganizing, owners of Hill Country Indoor, an 84,000-square-foot indoor sports facility, are hoping to break ground this summer.

"We are ready to put shovels in the ground now," co-owner Josh McKay said. "We aren't waiting for anything [financially] now. Ideally we would begin construction June 1, but we should begin work sometime this summer."

Originally scheduled to open in 2012, McKay and co-owners Chris Lupton and Jeffrey Spillar ran into financial hurdles and were forced to reinvent their business model and bring on a fourth partner. Jeff Kent, a former Major League Baseball all-star, agreed to be the complex's fourth partner.

"We got a guy who knows our project and knows sports," Lupton said.

McKay said Kent brought his own team with him to help redesign the facility, and they "knocked it out of the park."

The new design, located off Bee Cave Parkway, includes four regulation-size basketball and volleyball courts, a full size indoor soccer field, a smaller multiuse field, a gymnastics facility and a private membership area, McKay said.

"The new design is better on every level," he said. "It has a better utilization of space."

The exterior projects will be completed in Phase 2, McKay said. During construction of the building, the outdoor areas where the fields will be built will be used as a staging ground with Phase 2 beginning one to two months later, he said.

"We are still trying to make the outdoor area as versatile as we can," McKay said.

McKay said the group is looking for ways to build a full-size baseball diamond that can also be used as four separate T-ball fields or used for flag football.

The building will be tiered into four segments to fit the natural landscape of the area and decrease the amount of rock that would have been removed in the original plan, McKay said.

Additionally the group said the facility will have rain-harvesting stations, and the owners said they hope to use artificial turf instead of grass to cut down on watering and maintenance costs.

The revised proposal went before the Bee Cave Planning and Zoning Commission on May 6, after Community Impact Newspaper's deadline, and will be examined by City Council May 13.