This One's For The Girls: Women's Pro Sports Facilities On The Rise

As the popularity of women’s professional sports rises, so are new stadiums and training facilities built specifically for these teams in cities across the country.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing into the construction of these facilities as leagues add new teams and existing teams seek to recruit better and better talent.

These projects are rarely as big, shiny or expensive as their men’s sports counterparts, but they represent a new and growing investment opportunity while creating new nodes for potential future stadium districts.

“The residual effect of having these teams and these big franchises here that move their entire world headquarters here … is more people coming in, more people inhabiting businesses that are here,” said Lance Giroux, a councilmember in El Segundo, California, where the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks are set to build a $150M training facility.

The Sparks are following the lead of the Las Vegas Aces, which in 2023 completed a 64K SF practice facility and team headquarters in Henderson, Nevada. It was the first time in the 27-year history of the WNBA that a training facility had been purpose-built for sole use by a WNBA team, according to a team release.

Teams from Chicago, Dallas, New York, Indianapolis and the Bay Area have also either recently completed a facility or have one in some stage of development.

It isn’t just basketball. Women’s soccer teams are drawing major investments in purpose-built stadiums in Kansas City, Missouri and Denver. The Kansas City Current just opened its $117M CPKC Stadium and the brand-new Denver Summit FC is expected to get a home of its own as early as 2028.

The push to build facilities just for women’s teams is rooted first in the will to win. 

“A lot of these women have never had a training facility of their own,” said Susan Han, a project architect in Gensler’s Los Angeles sports studio who is working on the Sparks’ new facility. “A lot of them are practicing in community colleges, or they're renting a place with their male counterparts.” 

When the Aces’ new facility opened in 2023, team member Candace Parker told sports outlets that it was the first time in her 16-year professional sports career that she would have her own locker. Parker had previously been at the Chicago Sky, which broke ground on its own project last year but for now practices in a public recreation center. 

“That's what the Aces were doing, that's what the [New York] Liberty were doing. They're building these facilities, and they're saying to these women, ‘If you come play for our team, you're going to have these amenities,’” said David Berri, a professor of sports economics at Southern Utah University. “And not surprisingly, a whole bunch of stars went to those teams.” 

Practice facilities are more common than entire stadiums for now, but they could serve as a stepping stone for teams to grow their presence down the road, according to Berri.

And where stadiums go, entertainment districts tend to follow. 

“With professional women's basketball and soccer, with private equity coming into ownership stacks, these groups are looking at how to use the brand, the [intellectual property] of the team to drive additional revenue opportunities and real estate development surrounding [them],” said Phillip Ruhl, a senior vice president with CBRE who runs the firm's sports practice. 

That has proven true in Kansas City, where the Current is building a smaller 2,000-seat stadium as part of a trio of projects that will also bring a new training facility for the team and new youth soccer fields. The development has a $16.8M price tag and will be privately funded. 

Around the Current’s 10,000-seat stadium, a new riverfront mixed-use district is in the works. The $1B privately financed project will be built in stages, starting with a $200M phase that has 429 residential units, 48K SF of retail and roughly 2 acres of open space along the Missouri River.

Plans for Summit FC’s 14,000-seat stadium in Denver also indicate the possibility of future mixed-use development. The site totals more than 40 acres of infill land and has been eyed for redevelopment for more than a decade, with many mixed-use plans pitched but falling apart for various reasons, most recently the pandemic.  

Summit’s controlling owner, Rob Cohen, told the local city council that the stadium would likely cost in the $150M to $200M range, according to The Denver Post.

Not only have these uses increased land values in the city, Ruhl said, they drove up foot traffic and increased the likelihood other businesses will want to come to the area. 

Stadium construction has become something of a hot-button issue for many cities, as teams often request large sums of public money, occasionally with the threat of moving out of the city if the request isn’t granted. 

So far, the majority of women’s sports projects under development have been privately funded, but some, like Denver’s, have come with requests for tax breaks or city investment. That city’s approval of $70M toward the acquisition and preparation of the planned site drew criticism.

But women’s sports facilities, especially practice centers, are positioned to offer more community benefit through secondary uses. The simplest reason for this is the shorter seasons played in women’s sports, according to Melissa Clark, HOK’s senior project manager for the sports, recreation and entertainment practice.

“It's important to take a facility and make sure that it's used 24/7, 365,” Clark said. “In women's sports, there's still a lot of interest in developing young girls but also even boys as well and getting [them] involved with community teams, so there's a lot of interest in bringing tournaments to these facilities.”

In El Segundo, the teams engage in the community and make an effort to open the space to the public, putting on sports clinics for kids, for example. While the Sparks’ El Segundo home isn’t finished yet, professional men’s teams in football, hockey and basketball have training facilities there.

 “It’s a source of pride for us to be able to have all these franchises here,” Giroux said.