Children’s Mercy to be new health partner for Sporting KC
A new name and a new partner in working with children’s fitness and health were announced today for Sporting Park in Kansas City, Kan.
Children’s Mercy Park will be the new name of the $200 million soccer arena in Kansas City, Kan., where Sporting Kansas City plays its matches, according to officials. More importantly, Children’s Mercy will become the health care and sports medicine partner that will work with the new training facility being built in Kansas City, Kan.
Rob Thomson, executive vice president of communications for Sporting Club, said the facilities at the new National Training Center to be built will be tied to Children’s Mercy Hospital, which will lead the effort on prevention and health education around youth athletics. The name for the new training facility, to be built about a mile away from the stadium near I-435 and Parallel Parkway, has not yet been selected, he said.
The new training facility will include sports medicine and a rehabilitation center, he said. It will be a full range of services, programs, classrooms, courses, swimming pools, including places to test for concussions, he said. It will work with all sports, he added, and it will be a place where Sporting KC trains, as well as youth athletes.
“It will be a big facility to help with pediatric training, sports medicine, and may be one of the leading enterprises in the country, potentially,” Thomson said.
Today’s naming agreement is for 10 years, and will take effect Jan. 1, Thomson said. At that time, the current agreement with Providence Medical Center as the club’s health partner will come to an end, he added.
The agreement with Children’s Mercy came about after six months of meetings, Thomson said.
“We’ve had plenty of opportunities to sell the naming rights to our stadium,” Thomson said.
Sporting KC wanted the name to make sense from a business standpoint, as well as from a local standpoint, along with other goals, he said. Children’s Mercy is innovative, a great partner and has been around 120 years, he said.
“The energy is great,” Thomson said. It’s not just about putting a name on a stadium, but is about helping out, encouraging and being in contact with young athletes, he said. There are potentially hundreds of thousands of young athletes who may use the new training complex.
Some of the main parts of today’s announcement:
• A state-of-the-art Children’s Mercy Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation Center will be opened at the national training center next spring. It will serve Sporting KC Academy players as well as athletes from all sports, offering pediatric-trained sports medicine specialists, according to a news release.
• Together, Sporting Club and Children’s Mercy will develop a curriculum on nutrition, injury prevention, rehabilitation, advanced cardiovascular training and other topics for the Sporting Club Network, which includes about 200,000 players, parents, coaches, managers and administrators, including the Sporting KC Academy, according to a news release. The partners also will provide sports training, rehabilitation and conditioning programs for Sporting KC Academy teams at Swope Soccer Village, which has hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, the release stated.
• Children’s Mercy and the Sporting Club also will be working with the Sporting Moves school program, where Sporting KC players make visits to schools, educating children about health and the importance of physical activity to combat childhood obesity, he said.
Thomson said Sporting KC players and the organization have a long-standing relationship with Children’s Mercy Hospital, including many visits of players to patients there.
When asked if any money was part of the naming agreement announced today, Thomson said Sporting KC has a policy of not releasing any financial information.
Sporting Park opened in 2011. The stadium’s first sponsor was Livestrong Foundation and the name of the arena formerly was Livestrong Sporting Park, but the name was changed in 2013 after an agreement was terminated between Livestrong Foundation and Sporting KC.
The first stadium sponsor was with the Livestrong Foundation, known for its efforts in helping cancer victims. Thomson said Sporting KC still continues to build on philanthropic efforts it started then, including the Victory Project for children with cancer.
Sporting KC is owned by Sporting Club, and some of its principal owners include founders of Cerner Corp, which has two office buildings near the stadium. Cerner is a company that is known for its health care records programs and its assistance in delivering health care.
A Children’s Mercy official said they looked forward to the partnership.
“It’s not every day that an opportunity like this comes along, to partner with an organization like Sporting Kansas City whose passion and commitment to improving the health of our region’s youth is beyond question,” said Randall O’Donnell, president and CEO of Children’s Mercy, in a news release. “We’ve maintained that same commitment for 118 years and look forward to partnering with the Sporting Kansas City network to further our mission.”
Thomson said he is very excited about being on the forefront of this effort to help young athletes and he is eager see how the partnership with Children’s Mercy plays out in the next 10 years. Both Children’s Mercy and Sporting KC are very community-based, he added.