Spire plans to launch a student residential academy in September 2012 that will train and teach student-athletes in five sports: soccer, volleyball, lacrosse, track and field, and swimming and diving.
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Thomas Ondrey, The Plain DealerGeneva High School's track team is one of many in the area that use Spire's facilities. The space is so expansive, there's plenty of room for runners, pole vaulters and others to practice at the same time. With Tim Warsinskey
HARPERSFIELD TOWNSHIP, Ohio -- In the middle of what was once an overgrown grape farm in Ashtabula County, a community known for its quaint covered bridges, its wineries and its beachfront cottages, sits an ever-expanding sports complex so massive and sophisticated that those in the world of international athletic competition are comparing it to an Olympic park.
Its indoor track is one of the largest in the world.
Its main pool will be the fastest and most technically advanced, high-level competition pool in the country, its manufacturer says.
It has been a training site for the men's USA volleyball junior national team.
It is the largest single-purchase customer of AstroTurf ever, according to officials there.
And it will be home to the Michael Johnson Performance Training Center, which will provide a training system for youth and professional athletes designed and overseen by the four-time Olympic gold medalist in track and field.
"I have never seen anything like this," Stephen Whisnant, managing director of paralympic outreach programs for the U.S. Olympic Committee, said in March after touring the 175 acres outside Geneva known as Spire Institute.
"This is a gift. Not just to Geneva, Ohio. This is a gift to the world."
Spire, which began construction in 2008, is a sports wonderland for soccer-playing tots, grandmas who just want a place to walk, high school and college competitors, and elite athletes training for their next big event.
Among its features: An indoor-outdoor football complex that rivals those owned by the Browns and Ohio State University. A 300-meter indoor track used by area high schools as well as Lake Erie, Notre Dame and Ursuline colleges. And professional batting cages with video screens that let players choose a 100-mph fastball thrown by a major-leaguer or a modest curveball delivered by a youth pitcher.
The machines retail for as much as $45,000. Progressive Field has one. So does Yankee Stadium. Spire has four -- two for baseball and two for softball.
Spire has plans to add much more, all just a 45-minute drive down Interstate 90 from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
And most Clevelanders don't even know it exists.
That's about to change.
In April, the not-for-profit organization launched a glitzy new website, spireinstitute.org. It will hold a media day Wednesday to showcase the complex and announce the partnership with Johnson to local and regional news organizations. It has brought in Olympic athletes, executives from the sports management firm IMG and others to help promote it in the world of sports.
Founder and primary funder, Ron Clutter, has had his reasons for keeping the project quiet.
"I don't like to talk about what my wife and I do," he said during a recent interview. "This is not about us."
But the truth is, the man who made millions selling air conditioning units and generators to the military has supplied a significant portion -- he won't say how much -- of the $60 million that's been spent so far on the still-growing facility.
Clutter bought Nordic Air Inc. in 1998 when it had 18 employees and 5,000 square feet. When he sold the Geneva company in 2010, it had burgeoned to 300 employees and 250,000 square feet. Not bad for a guy who got his start scrubbing toilets for his father's janitorial company, a business he took over his sophomore year at Mount Union College, after his father died.
Clutter had another reason for keeping quiet.
"We didn't go out and tell people we were going to do it because we knew we'd be laughed out of the room," he says, shrugging his shoulders. "They were going to say 'I've seen these plans a thousand times before and it never happened.' "
That, he says, would've been followed by one more comment: "Why the heck in Geneva?"
The answer is as simple as Clutter, a guy who seems to have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The 52-year-old is an old-fashioned, patriotic, family man who spends his weekends greeting people, parking cars and picking up trash at Spire.
He's made the facility's 1,500-seat banquet room available -- gratis -- for more than one military funeral. And he still coaches his daughter's volleyball team, peppers his sentences with "holy cow," says a prayer before the day's competition begins and tears up when he mentions his parents' influence.
"We were raised that it's your moral responsibility to share in your successes," he says of his wife, Tracy, and himself.
Besides, he says, Geneva -- the place where the couple grew up -- deserves it.
His third response says the most about Clutter. It's a quote from one of his role models, Walt Disney:
"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
Building something "GaReat"
Locals still call Spire "GaREAT," its original name and an acronym for Geneva Area Recreational, Educational, Athletic Trust, the trust with a seven-member board, headed by Clutter, that oversees the complex.
But everything else about it is moving forward.
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Thomas Ondrey, The Plain Dealer Ron Clutter, Spire's founder and funder, downplays his role. "We are who we are because of all the people around us," he says. "Everybody else that we've come in touch with has been a part of grooming us. So therefore our success is their success." Dozens of volunteers help greet visitors, take tickets and run tournaments.Over the next two years, Clutter says, at least $40 million more will be spent on construction, bringing the price tag to more than $100 million. Its roster of 25 full-time employees is set to jump to 150 by the fall of 2012.
When the natatorium is finished in September, Spire will have more than 15 acres of facilities under roof, up from more than 10 acres now. For comparison, the playing area at Progressive Field is 12 acres.
The second outdoor track, scheduled to open in 2012, will include a "throws" stadium for the shot put, discus, javelin and hammer throw.
Also on the drawing board: An outdoor complex with up to 16 soccer fields and six softball and baseball diamonds, many of them artificial turf. An Athletic Nutrition Court will offer locally grown, organic, hormone-free foods to competitors and the public.
Dormitories are scheduled to be built by the fall of 2012, when high school students from around the world will move to Spire to attend one of its five planned sports academies in swimming and diving, track and field, lacrosse, soccer and volleyball.
Separate dormitories are planned for college students from Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies, which has an agreement in principal and is working through a contract with Spire to offer two programs:
The first is City Lab, a think tank that will bring graduate and undergraduate students from a variety of majors to Geneva to help Northeast Ohio tackle economic problems.
The second will be one- and two-week classes for high school sophomores, juniors and seniors called institutes. Each institute will focus on a sports-related subject: sports marketing and digital media, sports broadcasting, the business of sports and sports event management.
The partnership makes sense, says Robert Manuel, associate provost and dean of Georgetown's School of Continuing Studies. The Washington, D.C.-based university runs the largest sports management program in the country according to Manuel, who says 75 of its faculty members work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the U.S. Olympic Committee, the Washington Wizards and other sports organizations.
Spire will continue to host events such as the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics indoor track championships and bring in new events such as the 2011 and 2012 Mid-American Conference women's volleyball tournament.
In partnership with a to-be-named healthcare organization, Spire officials say it will open a sports medicine, wellness and rehabilitation center inside the aquatics center that will offer occupational and physical therapy and coaching to elite athletes, wounded veterans and the guy down the street.
It is bidding for the 2013 NCAA Division II Winter Sports Festival and the 2013-2014 U.S. Paralympics Track and Field National Championships.
And former Olympic swimming gold medalist Diana Munz, who lives in Lyndhurst, is working with Spire to develop the aquatics center as a regional Olympic training center.
"My ideal is to turn it into another hot spot for the U.S. Olympic Committee, to have this be a go-to spot," Munz said. "We have everything we need to make them want to come here."
Visiting the Spire complex
Since Spire's first building opened in March 2009, hundreds of organizations have paid to train or play there.
A soccer program for tots, for example, costs $60 for 10 weeks. Adult and youth indoor soccer leagues pay $765 per team for 10 games and playoffs. Batting cage fees range from $40 to $60 an hour. And senior citizens and others pay $1 a day or $15 a month to walk indoors.
Costs for events that use the entire indoor track or outdoor football stadium vary based on size and duration.
Spire moves beyond original goals
All of that is a long way from Clutter's original goal: To build a football and track stadium, and playing fields, for Geneva's new high school, which opened in 2006.
Once he started planning -- scribbling on napkins to show Tracy his ideas -- he realized he wanted to build something neighboring communities could use, too. And the project grew.
"With Ron, when he says he's going to build something, he's going to build it," says the former Tracy Coy, who, like her husband, was a three-sport athlete at Geneva High. "Ron never thinks small."
Now, he envisions Spire moving beyond sports and becoming a catalyst for development and jobs along I-90.
"This facility has a chance to be a game-changer in Northeast Ohio," Clutter says.
"Imagine a track championship going, a MAC volleyball championship, a soccer tournament -- all going at the same time as an international swim meet. That can happen simultaneously week in and week out.
"They'll stay in hotels here or in Lake or Geauga County while going to a Cavs game or the Rock Hall or Playhouse Square or to the Medical Mart.
"This truly will practice regionalism."
If Spire is able to spur economic development in Northeast Ohio, credit will certainly go to Clutter. And it won't be the first time he's been recognized.
In 2008, he was named Ohio Small Businessperson of the Year, which landed him an invitation to the White House.
That said, he will have plenty of help.
He has hired Jeff Orloff, a former IMG executive who ran the Cleveland Grand Prix, as Spire's chief operating officer.
His senior management team is made up of Ted Meekma, a former senior vice president and director of sports academies for IMG; Peter Johnson, who retired from IMG in 2006 as CEO of the sports and entertainment group; and Stephanie Tolleson, Peter Johnson's wife, who retired from IMG in 2006 as a senior corporate vice president.
Tolleson says she and her husband had no intention of working full-time again.
But they were so impressed -- with Spire's facilities, its plans for a sports academy, its commitment to education and economic development and its focus on working with wounded veterans and disabled athletes as well as elite competitors -- that they came out of retirement.
They're part of the team that will help Clutter carry out even more expansion.
He's been talking to developers, he says, about selling or leasing land for restaurants, a hotel, conference center and spa. Proceeds would go right back into Spire, he says.
"That's what our plan is, that it keeps re-investing in itself," says Clutter.
"I'm often asked by people 'When is this going to end?'
"And I say, 'Hopefully never.' "
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