Arena23, a groundbreaking indoor multi-sport amusement park, will open this year in Chandler, Arizona. The brainchild of NBA player and Fox Sports college basketball pundit Casey Jacobsen, the attraction is expected to become the leading indoor multi-sport amusement park in the US, engaging visitors with a variety of innovative sports simulations.
The attraction, inspired by Jacobsen’s love of sports, offers an immersive fusion of sports and technology. It features over 20 high-tech simulators, including the first-ever full-size quarterback football simulator and a boxing simulator with a motion-tracking punch bag.
A passion for sports
Detailing the background to the groundbreaking indoor multi-sport amusement park and the insights that led to its genesis, Jacobsen tells blooloop: “I’ve been an athlete my whole life. I was a professional basketball player, but I’ve loved all sports since I was a kid. It’s always been one of my biggest passions.”
Jacobsen retired from playing professional basketball in 2014, going on to be a TV broadcaster and analyst:
“In 2017, my wife and I got an opportunity to run a business in Orange County, Southern California, where we lived.”
The opportunity concerned trampoline park developer, operator and franchisor CircusTrix (now Sky Zone.)
“CircusTrix had trampoline parks in Central and Northern California, but they hadn’t entered the Southern California market for many reasons, the first being that it’s expensive. When they decided to bring a trampoline park to Southern California, they wanted to find the right partners and operators, so they contacted my wife and me to ask if we would run it. We didn’t have business backgrounds. We weren’t entrepreneurs. This was very much a foreign idea and was not part of our plan, but we had small children who loved trampoline parks.
“It was an opportunity that fit, and we love a challenge.”
From CircusTrix to Arena23
They agreed and opened CircusTrix Orange County in September 2017.
“It was an eye-opening experience,” he says. “We learned so much. It was basically our business school. We learned how to interview and hire people and run everything that there is to run in a retail business.”
The business was very successful. However, Jacobsen says:
“Trampolines are not my passion. It’s not what I get up in the morning wanting to do.”
Sports are his passion.
“While we were running the trampoline park, I had this idea in my mind,” he explains. “I kept looking around. The trampoline park was full of kids and parents having a good time. They loved it.”
He wondered if something similar could be created with a focus on mainstream sports rather than trampolines.
“The idea buried itself in my mind and my heart. I realised I needed to pursue it.”
Bringing the idea to life
When the COVID pandemic happened, Jacobsen spent the ten and a half months of downtime researching the idea that would eventually become Arena23:
“The pandemic helped give me the time and the excuse to really dig in on this,” he says. I began to make phone calls and emails throughout the world of sports games. The first thing I had to figure out was whether any big sports experiential games existed at that point—and if so, what they looked like.”
As it transpired, they do exist:
“They are mostly outside of the United States, in places including Germany, Korea, China, and India, which explains why, as an American, I had never seen any of these games before.”
He was reassured by the fact that such games existed, albeit outside the States. “If I had had to build all the games from scratch, the business would not have been viable. I’m not a software engineer, and it would have been too expensive. I needed to find games that already had a track record that worked and had teams behind them that could either update them or fix them if they went wrong.”
Having established it was a viable business idea, the next step was to identify the sports to focus on:
“As an American, if I were going to do an indoor sports entertainment facility, my first question would be: What is America’s number one popular sport? There is no second place. It’s American football.”
Creating custom games for Arena23
Unfortunately, no American football games seemed to exist:
“I found baseball, boxing, skiing, basketball. I didn’t find anything for football. That was the second question: if I opened an American sports entertainment facility, how would I ensure it had football?”
He contacted game manufacturers with his own design ideas for American football simulators. In the end, he explains:
“We actually designed three custom, never-seen football games.”
This was the genesis of Arena23. In terms of what guests can expect, he adds:
“You are coming to Arena23 to experience sports just for fun. We are not a training facility, and we don’t employ coaches. You are coming with your friends, your child, or both, and you can experience eight different sports.
“If you want to see what it’s like to be an American football quarterback, you can do that. If you like soccer and want to shoot a penalty shot against a robotic goalie, you can do that. You can hit tennis balls against a tennis ball machine that shows where the ball goes on a virtual tennis court.
“There might be customers who have always wondered what playing a certain sport is like. Arena23 is their chance to find out.”
The sheer number of sports available in one relatively compact space is, he contends, what makes the attraction unique:
“Our footprint is 22,000 square feet, which is probably smaller than your average trampoline park. You can walk into the lobby and see the MMA octagon, the baseball batting cages, and the ski simulator. We hope guests will feel like they’re walking into a sports wonderland when they walk in.”
Connect&GO partnership
RFID wristbands and Connect&GO’s integrated Konnect platform will enhance and underpin the cutting-edge visitor experience. Connect&GO is a leading global provider of integrated technology and RFID solutions for the attractions industry. By leveraging the firm’s attractions management platform and RFID wearables, the venue can integrate functionality, including eCommerce, point-of-sale, cashless transactions, F&B, and waivers. Konnect uses unique Virtual Wallet technology and real-time data to guarantee users a seamless and efficient experience.
Guests buy their RFID wristband, which is loaded with points according to the level of pass they’ve paid for. That wristband becomes their key to unlock Arena23, allowing them to enter the arena floor and pay for each sports simulator.
Detailing the partnership with Connect&GO, he adds:
“Early on, after I realised this was an idea with legs and not just a fun thought, I knew I needed to partner with a technology-savvy company. It’s a technology-heavy business: every Arena23 simulator is connected to the internet; when you play the simulators, you’re scored, and we put those scores on leaderboards for the people who want Arena23 to be a competitive, fun experience—though if you don’t care about a score, that’s cool, too.
“To let people compete against their friends or themselves, we needed a partner who understood RFID technology, and Connect&GO is one of the world’s leaders.
“I had conversations with four or five companies that did what they do, and I felt immediately that Connect&GO was the right fit. I had conversations with the CEO there and several of their team. They were so much more excited about Arena23 than the other companies that I talked to—and that’s important. I’m a young entrepreneur and want somebody who believes in my concept almost as much as I do.”
The guest experience at Arena23
The length of each of the eight simulator experiences – American football, soccer, tennis, baseball, skiing, boxing, basketball and auto racing – at Arena23 varies:
“The skiing simulator is a four-minute experience; the baseball one lasts about three minutes. The boxing one is 92 seconds or so, and so is the American football quarterback game. Guests choose which games they want to play. They can play the same game repeatedly if they want to or try all the different sports. Once your points are over, then you leave, or you can reload your wristband and continue playing.”
After playing, guests will likely have an appetite and can visit the post-game café.
Jacobsen explains:
“It’s a breakfast cereal-inspired dessert cafe. It came about because breakfast cereal is one of my favourite guilty snacks. There has been a trend over the last five years, and several successful breakfast cereal cafes have opened around the country. I love them and frequent them often. I thought the concept would be a perfect fit for Arena23.”
The target demographic
Jacobsen says the core target audience is the pre-teen and teen market. He qualifies this:
“I think people of all ages will like this. I’m 42 years old, and I can’t wait to experience everything we’re about to build, but I would say that pre-teens and teenagers are what we’re after. It’s an older audience than a trampoline park.”
In fact, there is a minimum age requirement at Arena23:
“You have to be at least seven years of age or older. While a 7-year-old might not have enough power to have a realistic chance of kicking a soccer ball against a robotic goalie, they could do the skiing simulator.”
In the long term, he comments:
“I guess, like any entrepreneur starting a new concept, the end goal would be world domination. But I’m a realist: I understand that this is a new concept that people don’t fully understand, so a lot of marketing education needs to be done. We need to tell people exactly what this is and why it will be fun.”
However, he adds:
“I believe this is going to be a huge hit, and it’s going to be welcomed in Arizona. When it is, I want to expand to a second location as soon as possible.”
Future plans
The plan will be to build smartly:
“I don’t want to put the cart before the horse; I don’t plan to franchise a bunch of them. I want to build, own, operate, and consolidate so I can control the growth of the company, at least at the start. For now, I want to focus on making sure that this one is really good—and then I plan on building a second as soon as it makes sense.”
Jacobsen and Brittney, his wife, will run Arena23. He comments:
“We had a blast together running the trampoline park. It worked well, and – perhaps surprisingly – we didn’t fight. We had confidence that we could do it together. We divided up responsibilities. I think that’s what made it work. We plan on doing that same thing: she has strengths that I don’t, and vice versa.”
In closing, he adds:
“Another reason I wanted to start this is personal. In America, I believe our organised youth sports culture is problematic. There is a lot of pressure on young kids to specialise in one sport and to train at it, essentially, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long. There’s pressure on parents to pay a lot of money for trainers and coaches. It’s driving many kids who aren’t that passionate away from sports.
“The numbers are trending towards kids quitting sports early because they don’t like that pressure. Winning is not that important to them. It’s a culture that takes the joy out of sports.”
Inspiring a love of sport at Area23
Sports, he stresses, are meant to be fun:
“I was one of those driven athletes who wanted to play basketball every day – I wanted to play sports all the time. But that’s not normal. Normal kids want to play sports because it’s a fun thing to do. We’ve gotten away from that.
” One of the things that I hope Arena23 will provide is an opportunity for young people who have either been scared to play a new sport because they’re not very good and they don’t want to fail or who have never been given the opportunity to try a sport.
“I hope this will be an alternative option for young people disadvantaged by our current American youth sports culture. I’m not claiming that what I’m doing is like curing illnesses, but there is a void of kids who are not having fun playing sports. I want Arena23 to fill that void.
“We can’t wait to see kids just enjoying playing new sports for the first time. I think they’ll have a great time, and that will make me smile.”
