It began as a real estate transaction. 

 

All business.

 

Six months later, it’s still business, but with a dash of emotion.

 

Shreveport real estate broker Emily Hays, along with her husband (Phil) and father (Gary Moore), have turned the old Trinity Heights Christian Academy just outside Shreveport (Old Mooringsport Road) into North Port Sports, a sports complex featuring volleyball and pickleball courts, along with a baseball field and a softball field. Teams or organizations can rent parts of the facility for practice or games. A church plans on having a Field Day at the facility.

 

So far, the three investors have put a little more than $2 million into the project – and that’s just for Phase One.

 

“Oh, gosh, it will probably be a seven-phase project by the time we’re done,” Hays said, laughing.

 

She and her partners weren’t laughing last June, when the property’s owner took them to the almost 25-acre site which had been abandoned for more than 10 years.

 

“We walked on campus, and it was destroyed. . . . It had been overrun with vagrants, drug dealing, and all of that,” Hays recalled.

 

But the owner had started cutting back some of the overgrowth, hoping someone would see a vision for something better.

 

That “someone” was Hays who, along with her partners, originally wanted to start a sports complex from scratch.

 

“When we found the property, it became the gold standard. Can we do better than this? The answer was always, ‘No’. There’s already a parking lot. There are two gymnasiums we had to completely remodel, but they are already there. There were all of these things there that made it better than anything we were going to build from the ground up.”

 

By the end of this month, North Port Sports will be open for business. There are three volleyball courts in each of the gyms. One gym is exclusively for volleyball, while the other gym also has six pickleball courts.

 

“The need was enormous,” said Caley Carter, Owner and Director of the local TC Elite Volleyball Club, which has approximately 450 players. “Everywhere we play in our club tournaments have facilities like this. We were literally the only place in the surrounding area that didn’t have our own home. We’re the biggest club in north Louisiana, so our TC Elite Club team had the biggest need for it.”

 

TC Elite will be North Port Sports’ first full-time tennant, practicing and playing matches.

 

But back to the “emotion” part of the story.

 

“We didn’t realize how many people in this community have ties to Trinity Heights Academy,” Hays said. “You don’t go through more than one conversation without someone saying, ‘My husband went there.’ ‘My brother went there.’ ‘My uncle was the basketball coach.’ We saw how important it was to people that someone was revitalizing that property. Seeing how important it was to the alumni and people connected, it’s really become more emotional for us. It started as a business, and it’s changed into something of a passion project.”

 

And Hays hopes North Port Sports will play a role in changing the perception of Shreveport — especially to outsiders.

 

“I spend most of my days in real estate, working with corporate people who are moving here and they are mad they are moving here. They google (Shreveport), and they’re like, ‘You’re the murder capital, you’re this, you’re that. There are all these negative things — prove me wrong.’ My favorite part of my job is that I get to take these people around the city and be like, ‘This is awesome!’ . . . . These are the places and the people that make this community amazing. This is another part of that. We have this non-agenda sports complex. Most sports complexes here come with a big agenda. You have to play for the right club, or you have to participate in the right league to use it. This is a place where kids can come and love their craft.”

 

Like the kids of TC Elite Club, who are impressed with their new digs.

 

“The kids that have played with us a few years have seen these other facilities,” Carter said. “Dallas is huge for Volleyball. They’ve got like 20 of these facilities in just the Dallas area. Our kids walk in and they’re like, ‘Oh my God! It looks just like Dallas in here!’ . . . . Now we have that of our own, and it’s so nice to see their little eyes open up when they come into the gym.”

 

Phase Two of North Port Sports calls for six to eight outdoor pickleball courts, along with re-purposing several freestanding buildings which were used as classrooms. 

 

“We’re the kind of people that God says, ‘walk”, and we walk. That’s what we’re doing. When He says, ‘stop walking,’ we will stop, but He hasn’t done that yet.”