Eastland Sports Complex, a $67M youth sports hub, coming to Charlotte
In 2009, Rick Lewis left the corporate world and made youth sports his job.
He’s run hundreds of basketball tournaments for the Statesville-based Phenom Hoops over the past 17 years and has built one of the largest youth and amateur sports brands in the Southeast. And Lewis, 69, said one of the biggest changes he’s seen is the plethora of multi-court facilities popping up throughout the Carolinas, including in Rock Hill.
“Those things bring major economic impact,” Lewis said. “More and more people are waking up to that fact.”
This week, Charlotte inched closer to adding its own multi-court facility, as the Eastland Sports Complex officially broke ground near the site where Eastland Mall once stood off Central Avenue.
Eastland Sports, expected to open in 2028, will be a 29-acre complex that includes a 100,000 square-foot indoor facility with 10 basketball courts. Outdoors, there will be six multipurpose fields, set up for soccer, lacrosse, field hockey and flag football.
The Charlotte Soccer Academy, a longtime success youth program based in south Charlotte, will have a building at Eastland and help plan and run activities there, while maintaining its current headquarters.
The $67 million east Charlotte facility will also include a dedicated restaurant, and organizers expect that additional restaurants and hotels will pop up near the campus in the future. That would mimic growth at the Rock Hill Sports and Events Center — which hosts national basketball tournaments and the American Cornhole League world championships — and similar facilities throughout the southeast, including LakePoint Sports, in Cartersville, Georgia, about an hour outside Atlanta.
But unlike many of those multi-use facilities, built in small cities or faraway suburbs, Eastland will be nearly in the heart of Charlotte.
“We’re trying to build this in a way that’s different than any other sports complex you’ve seen,” said Robert Bolton, managing partner of Eastland Sports. “Essentially, this project is very unique, because the project is in an urban center.”
And that project is personal for Bolton, an Independence High School graduate who grew up in the shadow of the Eastland area.
“We really think this is going to be an activator” to spur more growth and revitalization to the area, Bolton said. “We always talk about activation, and this is going to be an activation point for the east side area, where we have to look at hotels and things like that in the future.”
There’s history that backs up Bolton’s statements.
Rock Hill’s facility, for example, opened in 2019. It doesn’t have the outdoor fields that Eastland will have, but it does include a championship basketball court with 1,200 stadium seats. It has eight basketball courts.
In 2024, according to the City of Rock Hill’s Parks, Recreation and Tourism, the facility generated 137,000 hotel room stays, attendance figures north of 230,000 and more than $62 million of economic impact.
“These things are popping up everywhere,” Lewis said. “And it’s because of that economic impact. Like in Rock Hill, they host the adidas (basketball) summer nationals, and you have all these teams coming to spend a week, all these colleges coaches and the economic impact is pretty big.”
Officials in Williamsburg, Virginia, recently contacted Lewis when they were considering building a similar facility there.
Lewis created a spreadsheet, showing that one weekend basketball tournament could easily attract 150 teams, more than 1,500 players, plus more than 300 coaches and more than 2,000 parents. Lewis estimates that could generate between 1,050 and 2,100 hotel rooms, not including money paid for tourism or food.
Eastland organizers believe their facility will create a $169 million annual economic impact, with 126,000 hotel rooms bought annually and 500 jobs created.
Bolton hopes to have a major health company housed in the Eastland building to help offer strength and conditioning and physical therapy. He said there will be plenty of use hours open to the public.
He is ready to get started, but added that 2028 seems like a long way off, except when it doesn’t.
“There are lots of times when I don’t sleep at night with all that I’m thinking about,” Bolton said. But things happen for a reason. I started out my young sports career at Winterfield (youth sports in east Charlotte). I went to Independence High School and I spent a good amount of time growing up on Farm Pond Lane (not far from Eastland). I got my ears pierced at Eastland Mall. So for me to be leading this effort here in the east side area, man, I couldn’t dream of anything more cool.”
This story was originally published March 6, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
