By Daniel Bradley
Indiana Business Journal
Westfield’s Grand Park Sports Campus is one of the busiest sports facilities in the country, but the city needs to find ways to turn its crown jewel into a year-round tourism destination, city leaders say.
To make that happen, Westfield officials plan to add winter sports opportunities and transform the area around the 400-acre sports campus into a hub of entertainment and recreational activity.
Mayor Scott Willis and Director of Economic Development Jenell Fairman told members of the Westfield City Council last week about a vision for how Westfield could add amenities such as retail, housing, hotels, gathering spaces, a boardwalk with a canal and an indoor ski facility to the Grand Park area over the next decade.
Westfield partnered with Hamilton County Tourism, Chicago-based real estate consultant Hunden Partners and Indianapolis-based planning firm MKSK to study how development could happen around Grand Park.
“The city is going to have to do some heavy lifting to get this off the ground, and we’re committed because we know the value is certainly there if we can get that done,” Willis told council members.
Grand Park, which opened in 2014, has 31 soccer fields, 26 baseball diamonds, two administration buildings, seven concession stands and a 378,000-square-foot multi-use event center. The Indianapolis Colts moved their annual summer training camp to the park in 2018.
Last December, Westfield selected a consortium of firms led by Indianapolis-based Keystone Group to manage and further develop the 400-acre Grand Park Sports Campus after a search that lasted nearly two years.
And last month, FIFA selected Grand Park as one of 24 potential locations to serve as a team base camp training site during the group stage—early rounds—of the 48-country World Cup soccer tournament that will be played in the United States, Mexico and Canada in June and July 2026.
Fairman told council members that Grand Park was the most-visited youth sports destination in the U.S. last year. The sports campus also was the 16th-busiest sports facility last year, with 5.5 million visits. That ranked higher than Little Caesars Arena, home of the NBA’s Detroit Pistons and the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings, and the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Florida, which both recorded 4.9 million visits, she said.
Grand Park also had 1.3 million unique visitors last year. While many visitors were local, Fairman said 50% of all visitors to Grand Park from 2017 to 2023 traveled more than 100 miles to reach Westfield.
However, she added that Grand Park’s annual traffic peaks in the summer months and falls off dramatically later in the year.
“We have a lot of baseball diamonds, a lot of baseball tournaments that are driving traffic to the area, but then we have less happening of course in the winter months,” Fairman said.
Willis described a sense of urgency to add more winter sports options to Grand Park. He said businesses have difficulty staffing and budgeting when the Grand Park area is “busy like anything else for five months and then dead the other seven.”
“We’re not going to get any more hotels, we’re not going to get anything more than fast-food restaurants if we don’t start looking at Grand Park as a 365-day-a-year destination,” he said. “We need to create that winter destination.”
Working toward that goal, Westfield is creating a Grand Park master plan for undeveloped areas around the sports campus with two focus areas north and south of 186th Street.
To the north, Fairman described an area between 186th and 191st streets, near Grand Park Events Center, that could be a sports tech innovation center with destination development and entertainment opportunities. She said it could be a place for companies such OrthoIndy and a training site for the Indy Eleven soccer club.
The area could also feature a gathering place that Fairman compared to Georgia Street in Indianapolis, which hosted events this year for the NBA All-Star Game and U.S. Olympic Swim Trials.
“That vibrant street environment where you could have a celebration and people would gather and they would celebrate this really amazing event that was happening in their community, we can have that also in Grand Park,” Fairman said.
To the south, Westfield could look to develop the Grand Park Entertainment District on areas south of 186th Street and centered by Grand Park Boulevard.
Fairman said the area could feature a waterfront area created by connecting an existing 14-acre lake to the east and a new pond to the west by building a canal and a boardwalk. People could rent paddle boards and kayaks on one side and paddle through the canal to the other side, she suggested.
“This is something that we really are lacking in Hamilton County, especially those of us who are further away from the White River where we don’t really have this opportunity to get into the water and experience it as a nature feature,” Fairman said. “So, this would be, I think, a really great attraction for the area that would really center our mixed-use development.”
To create a space for winter sports, the area could also feature an ice rink and an indoor ski slope. Fairman said the indoor ski facility would target younger demographics and provide more visitors to Grand Park in the winter months.
“We can help keep our hotels and our restaurants and our retail establishments busy throughout the year,” Fairman said. “We’ll help them be adequately staffed during the summer and it will help create a better experience year round and better profitability.”
Fairman said the area could also include a specialty retail entertainment space that could include a business like Dave & Busters or Pinheads. A conceptual plan also shows multifamily buildings, office facilities, restaurants, hotels, parking garages and other amenities situated along the boardwalk.
“We would be really looking for opportunities to work with a developer to more fully plan this space,” Fairman said. Chicago-based design firms Speck Dempsey LLC and Perkins&Will are working to create a detailed masterplan to define what the city would like to see in the area.
According to a timeline for the Grand Park master plan, workshop sessions will be held between July and October, a draft master plan will be available for review in November and the Westfield City Council could potentially vote on the final master plan in January.
“The first time I saw that design I got goosebumps,” Willis said. “I think that’s what we’ve been talking about in Westfield for a decade. And, finally, we have a vision for it, and we’re going to be very aggressive moving forward.”
