As walls go up, countdown to Henrico arena's arrival is on

At Virginia Center Commons, the countdown is officially on.

The Henrico County Sports and Events Center, a 185,000-square-foot facility rising from the ground there where part of the mall once stood, is expected to be completed by about this time next year.

For Dennis Bickmeier, this means there’s a lot to do in the next 12 months. Bickmeier is the executive director of the newly formed Henrico Sports and Entertainment Authority, which is charged with overseeing all county-owned sports facilities – including the new arena, into which he and his four-person team are working to attract a plethora of local, regional and national tournaments and events.

On Monday, Bickmeier and other county officials gathered at the site to watch as the first several of 109 concrete wall segments for the arena – each one tipping the scales at more than 100,000 pounds – were lifted into place by a crane, beginning the process of solidifying as real a structure that has been discussed in one form or another for several decades by county leaders. (Dick Glover, who served as Brookland District Supervisor from 1988 until his death at 80 in 2017, had lobbied for such a building in part as a place to host the county’s annual high school graduations, which mostly have been held at VCU’s Siegel Center in recent years.)

Bickmeier, the former president of Richmond Raceway who joined the county in late March, has been tasked with helping to lead the arena’s construction while simultaneously trying to build and define the role of his agency, manage ongoing sports tourism efforts and seek new ones.

“We’re building the plane at the same time we’re flying the plane, and it feels like that some days,” he said with a chuckle during a recent interview in the agency’s second-floor offices in the Henrico Economic Development Authority building on Parham Road. “It’s ever-evolving.”

The arena (whose name at this point is just a working title, with a potential naming agreement coming at some point in the future) will be the first of its type in Metro Richmond. Its location – a few hundred feet or so from I-95 – should become a major selling point for the leagues and associations that might choose to bring their events here, according to Bickmeier and Dawn Miller (who along with Michael McCormack joined Bickmeier’s staff from Visit Henrico, the county’s tourism wing). The arena will be able to accommodate 12 basketball courts, or 24 volleyball courts – or some combination thereof. A section also will include retractable bleacher seating for more than 4,000 people, to allow for larger events like the graduations Glover once envisioned.

The demand for a facility like this, in this region, already was strong three years ago, when then-Henrico Recreation and Parks Director Neil Luther told the county’s board of supervisors that it would have been booked more than 30 weekends a year at that time, had it existed.

“You can see by the smile on my face that it’s been a lot of fun,” Bickmeier told the Citizen of his time with the county and of plans for the arena. “I have to keep reminding myself that we’re building something from the ground up. The sports authority and framework for the authority are new, but Henrico’s been in the sports tourism game for a long time. The foundation that’s been built is really solid. So while we’re building the authority from the ground up, we’re not starting from zero. We’ve got some history that we can use to help us build our strategies going forward.”

Additional excerpts from Bickmeier’s conversation with the Citizen:

What has it been like the past few months since you arrived?
We’re executing things that are already on the calendar, we’re looking at what other events we can go bid on, we’re trying to build facilities – all this stuff’s happening at the same time. We’re thinking about what’s coming that we can go bid on four or five years down the road. We’re building our strategic plan as well. That strategic plan for us when we’re done IS our road map.

Part of what we will do is retain and build on what’s happened in the past. [We have] a solid foundation in baseball and softball, and working with the [Richmond] Strikers on soccer, and go down the list – it’s impressive.

And then we catch ourselves thinking about what’s around the corner – the sports and events center, GreenCity [a nearby $2 billion development that will include a 17,500-seat arena]. So I think the prospects for our future are really, really strong.

How do you divide your time?
I’m extremely immersed in the indoor events center, from a construction standpoint. From literally day one when I got here, digging into that building and being involved in the construction meetings and the updates, and then looking at it too from my experience in the event business. Suggesting and recommending some things that I think will make this building even more attractive to event promoters that will want to come in there. Some of that is detail stuff – seating, the type of seating. How do we maximize the capacity that we can get in there with different type of seating. Just details, things that will separate us maybe from other types of facilities that are up and down the Mid-Atlantic and make us even more attractive to event promoters.

Do you view this as a facility that will elevate Henrico above similar localities or is it something that you will need just to be even with them?
Henrico and the region have done a really good job in the outdoor game. Five or six years ago, we had this conversation with the county in my former job at Richmond Raceway. And my phrasing back then to county leadership was “The county’s doing an amazing job with the outdoor game – what about the indoor game?” So I feel like I’ve been involved in this project from the beginning. And ultimately its location at Virginia Center Commons is a really good location.

And so I kind of look at it in two ways, that it was kind of the next step for the county to build upon the successes of what’s been done with our outdoor facilities. Then the second piece of that is it gives us a competitive opportunity to go against other localities that have facilities like this up and down the East Coast, so event promoters aren’t jumping over us and going somewhere else. It gets us in the game, I guess is a better way to say it. It gives us the opportunity to bid, to make competitive bids against other localities that have facilities like this.

What has the interest been like in this facility already?
As a team here, the amount of calls that we have fielded, that have come in to us, of interest in the building gives us great confidence. As a team, we’ve put together what even a mock calendar would look like. What do those 50 weeks look like? A lot of that has just been from incoming calls, and then we sit here in this conference room with our partners over at Richmond Region Tourism, who will be active participants in this as well, to talk about what events can we go bid on as well, and how does all of that fit into the calendar? [It’s] literally putting puzzle pieces together.

How will you handle interest from organizers of multiple events within the same timeframe?
There are a lot of things that we have to look at. Our job is bring visitors to the area, and I think we have to look at where we can make the biggest impacts on hotels, the hospitality industry. That’s a big part of it. We haven’t sat here and penciled out all of our criteria, but I think you need to look at what are some of the bigger drivers of economic impact, what’s the history of the event at other places, the event promoter – things like that.

There are a number different criteria that we’d be looking at. Richmond Region Tourism has done a really good job looking at and scoring events that we would want to go after – how does this event score against a number of criteria?

Certainly local use is very important for this building. We have to fit that [community access] into this building as well. That goes into all of those puzzle pieces having to fit, too. But then when you think about the events that we can have in there, it provides to the entertainment value for our residents as well. It’s not just the opportunity for our local athletes to participate in events in the building, but it brings a level of entertainment value to the community.

What kind of events do you envision here – regional AAU-type events, for example?
Definitely. We’ve got a number of AAU promoters that are in the area. Volleyball – Richmond Volleyball Club, Old Dominion Volleyball Club. The Richmond Strikers, they’ve got a very robust futsal program. And then you start looking at, what are the high school opportunities? We had the Virginia High School League sitting [right here].

So we’re knocking on a lot of doors. We’d love to have some VHSL events in this facility. We’d love to have some of the national governing body events. A building this size, probably more sectional type qualifiers. This one [pointing to a rendering of the GreenCity arena]? Those are national events right there. But that’s part of our job is to see what other doors we can knock on that we have not been able to knock on before.

And then the third component for us. We have a desire as a sports and entertainment authority, to either co-promote some events or to own and operate our own events. And what is that? Is it a high school holiday basketball tournament? Could be. So we’re excited about the prospect of co-promoting or owning and operating our own events, as well. Music, other family entertainment, educational opportunities – all those things are on the menu.

Could you have multiple events using the arena at the same time?
We could. One of the things that we are adjusting right now is the curtain system inside, that will give us the ability to segment the facility even more than was originally planned, to create even more pods in the building, where we could have basketball going in one pod, we could have volleyball going in another pod, and we could have futsal going in another pod.

That’s what I love about this building is that we’ve really looked at the flexibility that could be achieved inside this building. I think a lot of people have gone in with the mindset that if it’’s in a basketball configuration, that’s it – it’s just basketball that day. And we’ve said, Yeah, that might happen. But it could be three or four things, as well.

Will this facility be limited to sports, or could we see concerts here?
Absolutely – that is definitely in the program mix. It’s educational opportunities as well [such as robotics competitions]. There’s a reason we have the graduation photos up there [on renderings of the arena].

Will there be a certain number of days a week that it will be reserved for local use?
It’s a process. There are a lot of local youth athletic associations that have reached out to us that are interested. We talked to our partners over at Rec and Parks about programming opportunities with Rec and Parks. In five minutes, you will get sick of me saying “We are putting a puzzle together, so give us some time to put the puzzle together.”

What is the construction timeline looking like?
The timeline is September 2023. The contractor is confident in that. That timeline is holding. Our plan is to do a soft opening, so if we get the keys to the building in September of ’23, we’re going to take a couple months ourselves to break the building in, to get used to it functionally, and then start looking at our bigger events. But really our main calendar for us from a sports tourism standpoint would really kick off in January of ’24.

Are you able to start scheduling events yet?
We’ve got to think two, five, 10 years down the road. It’s funny explaining what I do now and what we do as a team to family and friends. It’s like, Yeah, we go bid on events. But we don’t go bid on an event in August for the following month – we bid on an event in August for two years from now or five years from now, so we’ve got to be visionaries in some respects, but we’ve also got to be on top of what’s out there to bid on. That’s our team, that’s Richmond Region Tourism, that’s going to conferences and talking to event promoters and organizers about what’s available, be it AAU basketball or futsal or volleyball, go down the list.