Tulsa, OK

Last Friday, a ceremonial ground breaking was held for the new Downtown Tulsa Stadium. Representatives from the City of Tulsa, Tulsa Stadium Trust, Tulsa Drillers, Colorado Rockies, Texas League, Greenwood Chamber of Commerce, Tulsa Community Foundation and Downtown Property Owners were all on hand to participate.

The Tulsa Downtown Stadium will be a multi-purpose facility with the prime tenant being the Tulsa Drillers, Double A Minor League team. The stadium will be approximately located on an eight-acre property positioned between Highway I-244 on the North, Archer on the South, Elgin on the West and Greenwood Chamber facility on the East. The stadium will have the capacity to seat approximately 6,500 attendees, including 30 suite boxes and berm seating in the outfield.

Earlier this month, the Tulsa Stadium Trust accepted a construction bid from the Tulsa Stadium Construction Company LLC, consisting of the Tulsa Community Foundation and Manhattan Construction. With financing complete and a construction firm identified, the 6,200-seat stadium is set to open for the 2010 Tulsa Drillers season.

The stadium is being designed to Triple-A specifications, even though the Tulsa Drillers are a Double-A baseball team. “It is being designed in such a way that if at some time a Triple-A team comes, it would be easy to upgrade the stadium,” he said.

The trust has signed a 30-year lease with the Drillers.

Lybarger also said that because of the way the project unfolded, a lot of preliminary work has been done with the HOK Sport architect firm in Kansas, which incorporates energy-efficient construction methods in its projects. He said the hard design is not yet complete.

The stadium will be a multipurpose venue with baseball as the primary use, but during the offseason it will be host to a variety of venues, Lybarger said. SMG, which manages the BOK Center, will help book events for the stadium such as open-air concerts, he said.