Original Article Posted: Oct 1, 2015

http://westfaironline.com/74711/with-roots-in-westchester-a-sports-center-business-grows-nationally/

With roots in Westchester, a sports center business grows nationally

“It’s not a home run,” said Shane Coppola, leading his visitor on a tour of House of Sports, his company’s recently acquired 100,000-square-foot sports center in a converted warehouse in Ardsley. “It’s not ever going to be the next Snapshot or Google.”

Coppola was speaking of the indoor and outdoor sports facilities business that his private company has been building for several years in Westchester and around the country. The baseball metaphor seemed especially apt from the founding chairman and CEO of American Skating Entertainment Centers LLC, whose latest purchase, tucked away on a dead-end street between Route 9A and the Saw Mill River Parkway, includes baseball training facilities and a baseball academy.

“It’s a good business if you acquire it at the right price,” said Coppola, a former banker and media industry executive who ventured into a new business arena in 2006, when he bought the Westchester Skating Academy in Elmsford for about $6 million in a hard-negotiated deal. “We generally stayed away from and will continue to stay away from building these facilities.”

Instead his company prefers to be the second or third owner of sports entertainment properties. “I would never build one – including Westchester,” he said. With land prices, property taxes, construction and employment costs, “It’s pretty difficult to build these things – it’s very difficult.”

In August, Coppola’s company and two minority investment partners prominent in the county’s commercial real estate market – Robert Martin Co. in Elmsford and Diamond Properties in Mount Kisco – closed on their $4.88 million purchase of House of Sports. Coppola called it “a beautiful building, state of the art” and among the top 5 percent of sports centers nationally in infrastructure and amenities.

The three-company partnership, American Sports Group LLC, is its second owner. The sports center’s seller in Ardsley, Elm Street Sports Group LLC, a family business, paid $3.9 million for the vacant industrial property in 2011 and opened it three years ago as House of Sports after a costly construction project.

Coppola said the previous owners, newcomers to the sports facility business, invested $23 million in the development. “It just wasn’t achieving the results that they expected or projected or wanted,” he said.

American Skating Entertainment Centers took over management of the massive sports complex this summer and named a former Elm Street Sports Group employee, Frank Lombardy, as its general manager. He leads a staff of about 100 full-time and part-time employees.

Coppola said his company will apply its more inclusive business model to the operation, offering its own programming particularly for younger children starting out in sports while opening the center’s indoor turf fields and basketball courts to outside clubs and organizations.

“That will be a big difference going forward,” he said. “There will be a lot more organizations than there were before” using House of Sports.

In its own program offerings, “As a company, that’s really our biggest focus, the 2- to 8-year-olds. We’re really focusing on the bottom of that pyramid. …Focusing on the kids, because those will be your customers for life.” The company advertises those programs on mommy blogs and in parent and family magazines and community weekly newspapers.

His own kids’ athletic pursuits led Coppola, a Tarrytown resident, to a new business opportunity a decade ago as he prepared his exit from Manhattan’s corporate media world and his CEO job at Westwood One.

Raised in Buffalo and educated at the University of Rochester and its business school, Coppola began his career as a banker in 1989 in the media finance group at TD Bank. Persistently courted by his father-in-law, David I. Saperstein, he gave up his office in the bank’s midtown Manhattan tower three years later to join Saperstein’s more humbly housed company based in Houston, Metro Networks, which furnished traffic reports to radio stations.

As executive vice president, Coppola led a series of acquisitions to build up the company’s national network and added news and television services, installing TV cameras on buildings in New York and 25 other cities. The company expanded from 15 media markets to 100 markets and its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization grew from $2 million in 1992, when Coppola came aboard, to $30 million in 1996, when Metro Networks went public under his direction.

The company’s success did not go unnoticed within the media industry. Coppola said he was his father-in-law’s point man in negotiations with Westwood One Inc., the national radio-programming network, which in 1999 acquired Metro Networks for approximately $1 billion.

Coppola stayed on with Westwood One as executive vice president for three years before leaving to explore a business venture in community weekly newspapers. A year later, amid executive turmoil and changes at Westwood One and its parent companies, he accepted an offer to return to the radio network as its president and CEO.

He led the company until late 2005, when his sudden resignation as CEO surprised the industry.

Coppola said he had had grown dissatisfied in his corporate duties as Westwood’s CEO. “It wasn’t about growing and it wasn’t entrepreneurial,” he said. And radio revenue in 2005 was in decline. “I saw the writing on the wall.”

In Elmsford, Coppola saw an ice rink operation with regularly returning customers like his son and daughter.

“To me, that’s always the first thing: is the customer happy? If the customer’s not happy, you probably don’t want to get in or stay in that business.”

Coppola began negotiating a deal for the facility before his resignation from Westwood and closed on the roughly $6 million purchase about six months after his departure.

“I liked what I heard and what I saw in those first two years” in the sports facility business, he said. In 2008, his company embarked on a series of acquisition and partnership deals.

With the House of Sports purchase, American Skating Entertainment Centers now owns or operates 17 sports centers, indoor skating facilities and outdoor holiday ice rinks in New York, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Arizona and California. The Elmsford company partnered with American Entertainment Group to manage AEG’s Toyota Sports Center, the official training center of pro hockey’s Los Angeles Kings and basketball’s Lakers in El Segundo, Calif., and to open a holiday-season ice rink outside AEG’s Staples Center in Los Angeles. Coppola’s company also operates the LA Galaxy Soccer center in Torrance in a joint venture with AEG.

“I’ve probably seen 200 facilities around the country,” said Coppola. “You have to look at very many to get one.”

“In some way, I think it’s been fast,” he said of his company’s growth. “In other ways, I think it’s been slow. The hardest part about the growth is doing it smartly. We’re not going to do dumb things.”

Closer to home, American Skating Entertainment Centers a year ago began operating Playland Ice Casino in Rye under a 10-year management agreement with Westchester County. Coppola said the company has invested $650,000 to $700,000 in interior improvements to the 86-year-old building.

“The challenge of this business in general is the seasonality of it,” he said. “They are seasonal businesses. Our job is to attract customers on a year-round basis.”

“It can be a good solid return on investment business. It’s a good single-double business.” The financial returns aren’t soaring out of the ballpark, that is.

“Overall, it’s been a great business,” said Coppola at House of Sports. “And most importantly, it’s fun.”