I Cleveland Cavaliers have unveiled the design of their new sports center. A completely state-of-the-art facility with some incredible features.
It will be called Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center and will be built on the banks of the Cuyahoga River, just a few feet from Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, the facility where the Cavs play their home games. The project will be financed by the franchise, Bedrock (a company with which owner Dan Gilbert manages and owns several facilities) and Cleveland Clinic. The Cavaliers currently train out of town at Independence, but with the arrival of the G-League team, space is starting to get tight.
The new facility will be nearly 2,000 sq. m. and will also be usable by ordinary people, not just professional athletes. It will be the world’s largest sports facility. The most impressive feature will be the possibility of having a simulator of the various NBA arenas. In essence, at the push of a button, the practice court will transform into a reproduction of the arenas of the Cavs’ opponents, allowing players to train in a faithful reproduction of the environments in which they will have to play. The idea of such a state-of-the-art center also has technical implications; in fact, management sees it as a valuable attraction in convincing future free agents to move to Cleveland.
The space designated for the sports center was already owned by Gilbert, who had previously planned to build a casino. Now he has changed his plans, opting for a multidisciplinary sports facility, with space also for wellness, medical and scientific research applied to sports. The Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center is part of a larger plan to redevelop the riverbank: the project is expected to extend to about 14 hectares with commercial premises, offices, parking lots, 2,000 housing units and much of the space designated for green space.
All with the highest requirements for sustainability from the environmental point of view. In short, a sports and wellness laboratory that looks like something out of a science fiction movie. The total investment is approx. 3.5 billion [$8 billion]. Timeline? Approval by the city planning commission in the coming months, start of work as early as 2024, and opening scheduled for 2027. The design will be by the architectural firm Popolous, a world leader in the construction of sports facilities. Their portfolio includes the Tottenham stadium and several facilities used for the Olympics or World Cup. The same firm is working on the design of the possible new Inter Milan stadium in Rozzano; in the United States it has built the complexes used by the Purdue (NCAA) and San Francisco Giants (NFL) football teams.
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