Sporting Life Plentiful in Metro North Region
Published Apr 17, 2007
The $45 million Broomfield Event Center is home to the Rocky Mountain Rage minor league ice hockey team and the Colorado 14ers of the National Basketball Association Development League.
Go, teams, go. Go, athletes, go.
Spectator sports are readily available to Metro North Region residents, beyond the major league baseball, football, basketball and ice hockey teams playing next door in Denver.
For example, amateur sports tournaments for softball, baseball, hockey and figure skating bring thousands of visitors to the region each year, providing a boost to the local economy.
And now, here come two large sporting venues to the Metro North – in Broomfield and Commerce City.
On Nov. 1, 2006, the $45 million Broomfield Event Center opened its doors to the public. It is home to the Rocky Mountain Rage minor league ice hockey team and the Colorado 14ers of the National Basketball Association Development League.
The Rage play 32 home games during their regular season that runs from late October through March, and the 14ers have 23 games during their season that goes from November to April.
“The arena has 6,000 seats, 25 suites, a sit-down restaurant, two themed bars and a separate basketball practice facility,” says Trey Medlock, executive vice president and general manager of the Broomfield Event Center. “It will host more than 130 events per year, including sports, concerts, trade shows and rodeos.”
Medlock says the center’s convenient location on U.S. 36 will pull crowds not only from Broomfield and nearby Westminster, but also from Louisville, Boulder and even Denver.
“We are going for family crowds who want to attend fun and exciting sporting events without having to pay big money for tickets and parking,” he says.
In Commerce City, construction of an 18,000-seat home of the Colorado Rapids of Major League Soccer is scheduled for completion by April 2007. The yet-to-be-named facility “will be the first major league sports stadium in Colorado outside of Denver,” says Heather Grady, marketing and public relations director for Commerce City. “The trend in Major League Soccer is for teams to build their own fields that are soccer-specific, bringing fans closer to the field. This will be a beautiful facility.”
In addition to soccer matches, the stadium will host occasional concerts, with capacity at those events expanded to as much as 26,000.
“There will also be a complex tied to the stadium that features 24 sports fields primarily for youth soccer, laid out in groups of six fields,” Grady says. “Two of the fields will have artificial turf, and the entire complex will feature lighting for night games.”
The cost of the project is $71.2 million.
Grady says the Metro North Region should easily be able to support sports venues like the soccer stadium and the Broomfield Event Center.
“This whole region is growing so rapidly – for example, the population of Commerce City in 2000 was 21,000, and we are projected to reach 70,000 residents by 2010,” she says. “With the people of Metro North so devoted to sports and fitness, big-time spectator sports will be a welcome addition to this region.”
Story by Kevin Litwin
Photo by Antony Boshier
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