Since the 1970s, fans sitting in the upper decks of Kauffman Stadium could look past the outfield and see the Adam’s Mark Hotel just across Interstate 70.
In its glory days, the hotel was a mainstay for out-of-towners visiting the Truman Sports Complex. In its later, less distinguished years, it hosted low-budget bridal expos, raves, and a water park called CoCo Key — a cacophony of chlorine and plastic slides that, for a time, drew in families with the same centrifugal force as the Royals and Chiefs across the way.
That all ended, as many things did, in March 2020. The hotel closed, first temporarily, then permanently. The water park was drained and forgotten.
Now, this long-empty space is being brought back to life — not by baseball or football, but by pickleball. Of course it’s pickleball.
June 11, SW19 at the Stadium opens its doors in the former CoCo Key space. Part sports facility, part culinary venture, and part community project, it was spearheaded by Community Builders of Kansas City, a nonprofit that usually focuses on housing and economic development, not recreation.
“We didn’t set out to build a pickleball facility,” said CBKC president Emmett Pierson. “We thought we’d turn the property into a sports training campus, something that could host tournaments and house athletes and families. Then a couple of friends asked if I’d ever played pickleball.”
He hadn’t. But after meeting Daryl Wyatt — a former pro tennis player and co-owner of SW19 Pickleball in Leawood — Pierson began to see the potential.
The result is a $6.5 million renovation that has transformed the former water park into an eight-court indoor pickleball facility with a full restaurant and bar, a coffee shop, and event space.
The courts will also serve as home base for the Kansas City Stingers, a pro team that plays in the National Pickleball League and is co-owned by Pierson’s nonprofit, along with Wyatt and local investor Julie Gibson.
CBKC bought the hotel property in December 2020, after the previous owner reached out to the city about donating it. The city can’t legally accept donations, so it referred the owner to CBKC, Pierson said, due to its status as a large nonprofit redevelopment organization.
“I thought, ‘Nobody gets anything for free,’” Pierson recalled. “But I think the deal was that the owner would be receiving a sizable tax break for donating to a nonprofit. And he owned several hotels in New York and the Middle East, and this was the final property he owned in the Midwest. So we went out and took a look, and the bones were good, and we ended up getting it for very little money.”
Once construction crews cleared out the rusting water slides and gutted the space, Pierson and his team worked with local firm Helix Architecture to design a facility from the ground up.
The nonprofit piece of the equation comes, in part, from a federal grant CBKC secured to train workers eligible for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits.
“So we’ll be training those workers in pickleball management, hospitality management, restaurant management,” Pierson said. “It’s creating what amounts to about 39 jobs. And we’ll at the same time be introducing pickleball to a new generation — and particularly to people in under-resourced communities. We think this is a model we could take to other under-resourced communities around the country.”
The restaurant and bar are being led by chef Keeyoung Kim, known for his Korean-influenced concepts Chingu and Sura Eats. The food will be a mix of casual favorites — burgers, chicken fingers — with Asian flavors woven in. There’s also a full-service coffee bar.
Above the courts, the hotel tower still stands — about 380 hotel rooms spread across 15 floors. CBKC plans to eventually convert those rooms into 275 mixed-income apartments, saving part of it for hotel space to accommodate pickleball tournament guests — and, maybe, World Cup visitors next year.
“All the old hotel furniture is still in there,” Pierson said.
And what about the professional sports teams across the highway, who can’t seem to decide if they’re going to stick around in their stadiums?
Pierson shrugged that off. “We’d love for them to stay. But this project doesn’t depend on them. We think this will be a draw because of the popularity of pickleball and the easy highway access we have here. This business model — it wasn’t based on the Chiefs and the Royals. It was based on pickleball.”
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David Hudnall writes about food and business for The Star. He is a Kansas City native and a graduate of the University of Missouri. He was previously the editor of The Pitch and Phoenix New Times.