By james art The biggest small city will welcome a new $5 million indoor track and field facility to the city in December courtesy of the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority. It comes nearly 17 years after Bill Cosby’s indoor track facility closed at the Livestock Events Center, completing a 2.5-year process from initial presentation to final product with a track that hails from Italy and the Mondo brand. The RSCVAboard approved the purchase in June 2023
“It was a two-and-a-half-year process from the initial presentation to people I met who worked for Mondo, we were doing research on what an indoor track would look like in our region and what it could represent in terms of space, overnight stays and economic impact.” , said RSCVA President and CEO Mike Larragetta. “After that, I will obviously go before our board and seek approval for a significant investment. It’s amazing that it’s here and just around the corner. It’s probably put a few white hairs on my head, but we couldn’t be more excited.”
Perhaps no one is more excited about the project than Donnie Nelson, the former Nevada men’s track and field captain who is now the RSCVA’s track and field specialist after most recently serving as the NIAA commissioner overseeing high school sports in the state.
“We’re an athletics town,” Nelson said. “It’s hard to imagine. With the Reno Games that were here and world-class athletes that came here, three world records that were broken here in those days, and it was a wooden track. It’s a rubberized state-of-the-art track, the surface used in the Olympics.”
Mondo is headquartered in Alba, Italy, and the project took approximately 1,600 hours to build from scratch before being shipped from Genoa. Packed into 12 shipping containers, each container takes about three weeks to arrive in Reno, as the materials are shipped through the Strait of Gibraltar to the Panama Canal before ending up in Oakland, California, and being trucked to the Reno Convention Center -Sparks.
“The sand for just the long and triple jump is 24 tons of sand and two tons of sand per bag,” Nelson said. “The track weight, just on the oval itself, is 265,000 pounds. My favorite number is the total number of components, it’s railings, panels, trusses, exit systems, is 6,338 components that help build this track.”
Six Mondo workers from Italy flew to Reno to help with the initial assembly of the track, which takes about 10 weeks and more than 2,600 hours to complete after entering the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. The third and final major shipment of materials is expected to arrive at the end of October before the track is painted silver and blue next month.
“We’ll start putting the tire on Nov. 4, and that takes about a three-week process,” Nelson said. “We’ll be painting the track for a week, that’s the last week of November, and we’ll be ready to go the first week of December for the big meets and introductions and opening ceremonies and the whole nine yards.”
Nevada Athletics will debut the new facility by hosting the Silver State Invitational Dec. 5-7, but the Wolf Pack isn’t the only one who will benefit from this transformational project.
“It’s not just about the college level,” Nelson said. “We’re talking about youth all the way to the majors, so it’s not just the NCAA and the University of Nevada putting on world-class meets. It’s going to be the Pacific Association, which is the biggest group within the USA Track and Field umbrella, getting everyone here is on the map for track and field.”
Reno’s indoor track will be the fourth in the West, joining Albuquerque, Seattle and Spokane. With a capacity of 1,200 spectators, the track is expected to bring additional tax revenue to Reno from November to March.
“Of those three tracks, only Albuquerque really uses its track as a tourist attraction for racing, room nights and economic impact,” Larragetta said. “So that was definitely something that was attractive to us. The second thing is obviously the seasonality of the indoor track. So for us to be able to bring that investment to that track in Northern Nevada, that would lead to overnight stays in the room at a certain time of the year. That was very attractive. We did the feasibility study and the process showed that in the first year we expect 15,000 to 20,000 nights in the first season and that will increase every year. Year five we’re projecting north of 50,000 nights.”
Added Nelson: “The away teams will come here, they’ll be able to enjoy themselves while they’re here. They’ll spend nights here and look back when they leave and go, “Wow, that was a top-notch event at a top-notch facility, and as a family we got to have a lot of fun at Truckee Meadows.”
The RSCVA has already held numerous conversations about the possibility of hosting high-caliber meets in Reno, such as the NCAA Championships.
“One day we are very confident that we will bid and host the NCAA Championships here in Reno,” Larragetta said. “They were held in Albuquerque last year, which is exciting that they will be looking at cities our size to host the NCAA Championships, which would be a huge win. We’ve had other discussions with professional meetings and maybe celebrity-type meetings, so the world is open to seeing what we can do in Reno at our indoor track.”
Added Shelley Fine, director of sports development for the RSCVA: “It gives me the chills to be honest. I’ll never forget when we went to the Reno games and I saw Michael Johnson break a world record. You’re almost freezing, and I think it’ll probably be the same for me on Thursday night the fifth of December (for the opening ceremonies).
You can watch the feature from Wolf Pack All Access below.