For a couple of New Yorkers and self-professed hockey nuts (just get them started on the New York Rangers), Frank and Salvatore Trazzera were realists.
They had seen the Blue Line Ice complex go down the tubes relying exclusively on hockey.
“Hockey, soccer and volleyball all contribute to the lifeblood of NYTEX Sports as a facility,” said Frank Trazzera, 43. “Even though hockey is our passion and love, all three sports play an equally important part in the success. The diversity makes the sports center sustainable, as opposed to just hanging your hat on just one.”
The NYTEX center — home ice for the Texas Brahmas — still hasn’t hit its stride fully as it enters its third year. The building, though gaining traction in its visibility and revenue every year, is still in the red and requiring “subsidization” from the owners.
In 1999, presumably hoping to capitalize on the hockey fever that swept the area when the Dallas Stars won the Stanley Cup, Greg and Valerie Fitzgerald spent more than $7 million building the giant facility on Ice House Drive, south of Mid-Cities Boulevard. It had two National Hockey League-regulation rinks, and one Olympic-size rink for figure skating.
The Fitzgeralds’ company expected 1.2 million visitors a year.
By 2002, swimming in debt and owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes, the facility had filed for bankruptcy. Two years later, it was closed, just as the nearby Home Town NRH was becoming one of the city’s most coveted neighborhoods.
For more than three years, the facility’s only draw seemed to be as a vandalism target. The place was covered in graffiti. Windows were shattered. People broke in and threw junk on the rinks.
Its fortunes changed in March 2007 when the Trazzera brothers bought the facility from Frost Bank and named it the NYTEX Sports Centre, a nod to the brothers’ connections to both states.
Their purchase led them to the Brahmas ownership at precisely the same time. The Brahmas had suspended operations for the 2006-07 season after a dispute with Fort Worth led to their departure from that city’s venues.
At least as important, though, was a recognition that in Tarrant County, hockey alone won’t pay the bills on a 140,000-square-foot building with three expensive rinks.
The owners — who did not receive any tax breaks from the city — quickly turned one rink into an area now used by a disparate mix of volleyball, women’s roller derby and community events such as Taste of Northeast.
The Brahmas continue to use the middle rink with its 2,400 seats.
Another major piece of the puzzle came together last year when the TCG Group leased the third section of the building for professional and amateur indoor soccer.
The Texas Outlaws professional indoor soccer team had played for several months at NYTEX, but it wasn’t until their backers saw the revenue potential of a full-time arena that they inked the leasing deal.
Youth and adult recreational soccer leagues, as well as soccer camps, now keep the arena busy almost every day of the week, said Marco Juarez, general manager of the Outlaws.
“Starting this month, we’ve gotten into flag football,” Juarez said. “In March, we’ll be kicking off a youth arena tackle football [league]. We’ve also reached out to the lacrosse community.”
Trazzera hopes to bring in concerts and trade shows, and he has plans for an all-day sports camp this summer. – [source]
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