QUOTE FROM ALEX MORRISON: We hope that Pickleball is to Macon as golf is to Augusta going forward that when people think of Macon, Georgia. They know that is the hub of pickleball where you know a facility like this can happen and that it's a place where such a growing community can really feel supported and invested in.

Brian Maughan:  This is BUILT, the podcast where you’ll meet creative leaders in the commercial real estate industry and hear how they do what they do.

I’m your host Brian Maughan, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer with Fidelity National Financial. In our fifth season of BUILT, we’re taking a closer look at the places we gather. From museums, to theaters to stadiums, we’re interested in the spaces that bring us together, and the people who work in them. 

And nothing brings us together for a little friendly competition, like the largest indoor pickleball facility in the world. But first, our guest and his team had to adapt part of a struggling shopping mall.

Brian: Today we have the honor of speaking with homegrown talent from the state of Georgia. Alex Morrison is the Director of Planning and Public Spaces for Macon-Bibb County Consolidated Government and the Executive Director of the Macon-Bibb County Urban Development Authority.  

[Sounds of Indoor Pickleball]

Brian: He is also a huge pickleball fan.

Alex: One of the major differences between pickleball and tennis is that pickleball is such a, egalitarian sport in that even if you're mismatched in skill, everybody can have fun. But in tennis, if you're not very close in skill, no one's having fun. So, I really, was enjoying the fact that my friends who had never had any interest in playing tennis were playing a sport very similar, that scratched the tennis itch as it were.

Brian: We’ll get back to the pickleball soon. But first, I asked Alex to give us the lay of the land in Macon, which is near the geographic center of Georgia.

Alex: So if you were looking at Macon from above, the reason Macon is located where it is, is the Ocmulgee River, and of course, the Ocmulgee River was the ancestral home of now the Muscogee Nation, and their capital city, Ocmulgee, which was located right here on the banks right across from what is now downtown Macon.

Downtown Macon was laid out in the early 1800s, with a grid pattern downtown. Macon, like any city, grew with the advent of the motor vehicle and sprawled out. And at its peak was Well, over 200, 000 people who occupied this area, and was then the edge of what was the Western boundary of the city.

Brian: Alex grew up not too far away, in rural Pike County. But he would come to Macon as a kid and teen to go to the Macon Mall.

Alex: and it had Macy's, Belk, Dillard's, Parisian, the usual stores, even a big Sears, and it was, like so many places. It was mecca. It was everything that was cool.

Brian: The Macon Mall is at the center of Macon-Bibb county, so it’s also in an important location, and when it was built in 1976, it was the largest mall in the state, with six anchor stores.

As a young person, there’s no way Alex could’ve known how much the mall would fit into his life as an adult. But first, he stayed local for college.

Alex: I officially became a Macon resident 21 years ago in 2003 when I matriculated at Mercer University

I fell in love with the place and decided to stay here in Macon and work for the city and work on its redevelopment.

Brian: Things have changed a bit since Alex was in college. The mall, like other malls around the country, lost tenants and value. And nearby – downtown Macon, like other small downtowns, was the focus of revitalization.

Alex: And since that time, there's been nearly a billion dollars of development between the area of Mercer and downtown, we've seen a massive uptick in population, massive uptick in jobs, massive uptick in property values, and we recognize that the mall, while back in the mid 2000’s was considered this extreme economic asset, it had become depressed.

The mall had lost all of its anchor stores. It was 70 percent vacant and the property value had gone down by over 80 percent to the point where it was what we call a drag on the rest of the neighborhood because that central anchor. was depressing in value. It was taking adjacent commercial values down.

It was dragging down residential value and leading to a lot of disinvestment. So as part of our overall looking at redevelopment, trying to use the existing infrastructure that we have, we were able to negotiate to have nearly two thirds of the mall property donated to the county as an attempt to redevelop it.

And we immediately had to think about, how we were going to spark revitalization in this area and return equity to the people who had been invested in this neighborhood for decades who had seen all of their equity diminish. 

Brian: From when you started to work in the Urban Development area of Macon. What do you remember about that location and who owned it, even in its kind of struggling times?

Alex: So it was actually called the Colonial Mall, when I was going in the ‘90s through the 2000s. Of course it had been built by, a local firm as the Macon Mall back in the ‘70s. But it had been purchased by Colonial Properties and then they sold to Hull Property Group, who had purchased several malls throughout the state of Georgia and throughout the southeast, and they were Buying ones that were particularly going through distress with the hope that they would turn around.

Brian: When did you enter into this idea of, hey, let's take this mall and let's repurpose it and let's revitalize it through this pickleball facility. Where did you enter that mix? Was it at the beginning? Give us a little history there.

Alex: We kept thinking that maybe there would be that spark of redevelopment and Hull tried everything. Hull had actually reached out to several. entities here in Macon Bibb asking if there would be a possibility for us to purchase the mall or for us to work out something and it was actually our mayor, Mayor Lester Miller, who was the first one to say, I think we can make something work here as long as we build the right partnerships.

And so, he was elected in 2020 and Macon Bibb County and the Urban Development Authority acquired the mall via donation in September of ‘21.

Brian: Hull Property Group still owns 30% of the mall, while the Urban Development Authority now owns 70%. When the Urban Development Authority got involved, the Macon Mall still had some retail stores open – and even some restaurants left in the food court.

Brian: And at that point was there a vision for this pickleball facility, or was it just still, hey, I think we can figure out what we should do, but it wasn't clear yet that it was going to be this massive, sports facility.

Alex:, The main thing that we thought was we were going to put government offices in, but we knew that if we started exploring spaces, we would come up with the right idea. 

And about the time that this conversation was going, the pickleball community in Macon really started taking off. Personally, I had seen the growth of the local pickleball community firsthand and had seen how Macon, because of its geographic location, because of its excellent facilities, was becoming a hub for pickleball.

And in conversation with our Director of Tourism, Gary Wheat with Visit Macon and the Mayor and I, we started brainstorming and thought if we could make it work, an indoor pickleball facility at the mall would be an excellent reuse.

Brian: Though pickleball has been around since 1965, Alex has been playing with a group of friends from the Macon area since 2019.  He credits the popularity of the sport to the game’s communal nature.

Alex: When we started playing, we started hearing more and more people say, yeah, I play pickleball too. We should all meet up. And the next thing, you know, this entire community of pickleball and Macon, just explodes.

Brian: In its 2023 Topline Participation Report, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association  named pickleball the fastest-growing sport in America for the third year in a row. According to the report, pickleball is now up to a total of 8.9 million players in the United States over the age of six, an increase from 4.8 million in 2022.

Brian: For you listeners who have never played pickleball, it’s relatively easy to play and understand.

Alex: Pickleball is a paddle sport that is a combination of volleyball, tennis, ping pong, some would say badminton, that is as though you were playing tennis on top of a ping pong table. So, it's played with a plastic ball, smaller paddle, and it's played on a much smaller court.

The kitchen is otherwise known as the non-volley zone, is a line at the front of the court, between the net and the playing area that you cannot step into volley. This makes the game far more accessible and easy to navigate. And it makes it far more competitive. So instead of it being a game of who can hit through the court the best, it's who can structure points the best.

You alternate sides every time you score. And the players must stay there and return from the side of court that they're on, determined by their score. It's way easier if you're on court playing it, but that's the, a general overview of Pickleball is that it's a combination of those sports and the advent and invention of the non-volley zone makes it a far more cerebral game than just one that is, about physical prowess.

Brian: Now that the county’s Urban Development Authority had the space and the idea, they were ready to commit to repurposing the building.

I know this sounds like a simple plug-and-play situation but nothing great ever comes easy. A project of this magnitude always has subtle details that have huge effects on the outcome.

Alex: First, we formed a small committee and said, let's, decide if this is even physically possible. And we learned a lot about what the minimum requirements for a pickleball court are and started measuring. And we originally wanted this to be in the former Macy's.

The Macy's had been the last anchor store that was fully occupied. So, it had the freshest update it had AC on most recently. So, we thought it'd be a little bit easier to work on that. And we got a little bit into the feasibility of it and realized that the Macy's building had something that was insurmountable. The center columns in the store that were literally holding the facility together were too narrow to fit a pickleball court in.

So, what you would normally have in these department stores, you would have 28 or possibly even 24-foot centered columns. Well, a pickleball court requires about 30 feet in width in order to fit a court. in between the fences and have adequate clearance on the sides and everything else. Maybe the pickleball there won't work. 

And we said, well, let's look at the other stores. We tried the former JCPenney. It had been closed a little bit longer. Same issue. Then we went to the Belk facility. And the Belk facility had 32-foot center columns

Brian: Oh, thank goodness.

Alex: As we have started looking at this, we have learned that this building was an absolute unicorn. That very few of these two-story anchor stores were built with over 30-foot width, columns and Hull, who's still involved with the project, they're still our partner, they actually still manage the mall for us.

They told us after seeing how successful this project has been from a construction standpoint and being open to the public and we've had multiple days where every court has been full with people waiting.. They started looking at their inventory and seeing, where can we do this anywhere else? And they said they have no other building in their entire catalog that they could physically do this.

Brian: Was it a local firm that helped you do these measurements? Was this just the Urban Development Authority? Who was your partner at this point in the process prior to construction right after the papers were signed by Hull? 

Alex: We immediately contacted the United States of America Pickleball Association, just to get their specs of what could work, and what the minimum requirements would be. From ceiling height to column width, to, capacity.

And then through our local team, I put together a small committee of folks to just help think through all of this. So, we had the team from Hull Property Group, our engineering team, a local engineering consultant, go into these facilities and start doing measurements. And once we realized that the Belk would work, we hired a local architect to help us design the facility. And you might be surprised, but he, Sidney Haynes, had never designed an indoor pickleball facility before.

In fact, scouring through architects in the southeast, we hadn't found anybody who had done a project of similar scope. Since then, you've obviously seen more department stores and facilities be converted, but none that were on this scale.

Brian: Give me a little bit of scale. Walk me through the floor plate. How many square feet, how many courts? Give me some idea of size.

Alex: Alright, So you've got 160,000 square feet , which 80,000 square feet up and down.

Alex: Once we did all the legwork for feasibility, we had final plans done, engineering analysis. We had originally thought that we would be dealing with Just a simple conversion of space, but realized that there was a lot more work that needed to go into it.

A lot of HVAC, we had to move some lines of fire protection. So, we utilized our property agreement with Hull and they helped us think through the demo of the space and all that.

Brian: It took about 3 and a half months of construction to convert the space and get it ready to open. Walking in here, you could forget that it used to be a department store. It’s now a whole pickleball experience.

Alex: That accommodates 16 courts on Each level. They are in pods of 4 around a center stair. And then on the upper floor, you have a check in desk, a pro shop, full locker rooms, full shower facilities, bathrooms, a meeting center, offices for the people who are working there. And then just a lot of storage. That's one thing I have learned about these old anchor stores is that what you perceive as the size of the building is actually much smaller because they shrink it by building the storage all around the edges. Which is great for us that all of that room was there, that we were able to have places to hold nets, chairs, stock.  

But what you have now is a wide-open span of these facilities that you can see, one end to the other and really get a sense of how massive this is. 

Brian: This is another thing that makes Rhythm and Rally unique: They have 2 floors, which makes 32 courts in total. // The process of going from a donated building, to a great idea, to a premier pickleball facility has never been done to this magnitude before. The story of how the facility was financed is unique, too.

Alex: So,we use two different financial mechanisms to make this work. The first is funding from our economic development partners, to invest project dollars, economic development project funds into the facility. Those are our funds that come from our sales tax. So, it didn't utilize property tax investment or general fund dollars of Macon-Bibb County for the construction.

But for all the HVAC, the electrical work, the plumbing, all of the things that are in that utility realm. We worked with Georgia Power to do what they call on-bill financing, where they actually pre-funded all of that work. and then over time, when we just pay our utility bill, we'll pay down that work. So, it's a creative form of finance where you actually work with the utility company for that work to be done. And what that does. It allows you to build more capacity without a major upfront capital outlay, which was instrumental in getting this project done.

Brian: Rhythm and Rally opened to the public on January 1st 2024. The unexpected reaction caught a few people by surprise. 

Alex: I have been just dumbfounded by how popular it has been in the first week and people have already fallen in love with it. I've already heard people say that this is where they're going to, play primarily. That they enjoy the fact that it's indoors. That it's extremely communal. And that it's part of something that's really impressive.

So, we had our first tournament even before we opened. The normal size of those tournaments would be about 150 to 200 players. We had well over 300 and starting this week, we're having a tournament that will have 900 players, and each of these is the biggest tournament that Macon's had. And we think that it's going to continue to grow like that because they know that when they sign up for a tournament at this facility, that tournament is going to happen.

Brian: And, there are other uses for indoor spaces like this.

Alex: Summer camps have already started contacting us about can they rent a part of the facility to have pickleball summer camps or sports camps, all throughout the year. Using the facility as a place to do after school programs to introduce, younger, kids to the sport in a safe environment and provide educational opportunities and provide wraparound services for people who are, working parents and who need some after school program assistance for their children, to provide that, safe environment and introduce them to a sport that's really communal. 

Brian: Even the local news is covering what’s going on at Rhythm and Rally. Here’s TV station WMAZ-13 in November, 2023.

“The county announced membership tiers for the courts… they hope the new courts and the tournaments will bring about an economic boom.”

Alex: We've had people who hadn't come to Macon, to the mall area in years. Have come to the facility, come to play. They've gone to the food court. They've checked out the other stores that are in the mall. They've checked out areas that are around there. And so, we've already seen the community respond in a way that we had definitely hoped, but we thought maybe it would take a little while. The fact that we've gotten a lot of response from the pickleball community, the broader Macon community and then we've had people drive four and five hours to come play in our facility because they knew they could get the games in because it was indoors.

Brian: So that sounds absolutely amazing. and I love the fact that there has been this ripple effect. That's gotta make those local businesses happy to have at least a good portion of those from, if not outside of Macon outside the surrounding areas.

Do you envision that Macon will become synonymous with Pickleball because of this facility and what it provides? Is this something that the city is going to continue to lean into?

Alex: Absolutely. We definitely think that Macon is going to become the southeast hub of pickleball between the Tattnall facility and Rhythm and Rally, we have, actually, over 50 courts that are available for play for tournaments. So, you can have indoor outdoor. Then the expansion opportunities with the Rhythm and Rally facility to have retail to have other events to be able to host larger gatherings. It really does set us apart. [music]

Brian: The conversion of the Macon Mall’s former Belk department store into the one of the largest indoor pickleball facilities might be the main story, but it certainly isn’t the only story. What about the rest of the mall? They have found some ways to use more of that space, too.

Alex: Along with the Rhythm and Rally, we've had some government offices. One of the floor plates, half of it has become our board of elections, which is, where the largest early voting site is. So actually, here in Macon have a early voting site that is completely air conditioned, completely indoors away from the elements, which we think is something that really sets us apart. The other facilities we've explored a lot of different options. Some of them we are still marketing for retail.

And we're also looking for things like medical uses for some of these anchors, our hospitals need places to expand or to have, outreach centers, gym facilities are all things that have already been brought to us. Some have gotten past the initial stage of maybe it'll work too, let's do some feasibility on that. And then the other is the possibility of converting some of these areas into housing or hotel.

That's something that we want to see on this site is to have places for people to live and to stay directly on site to support the Pickleball facility, as well as our amphitheater and that entire corridor. So, we've explored some of those options as well, but everything's really on the table for us, as far as these redevelopments and we're open to creative ideas.

We'll explore it, chase it down if it's the right thing for our community.

Brian: Well, if I venture up to Macon, will you play pickleball with me?

Alex: Absolutely. It'd be my pleasure.

Brian: Fantastic. Alex, it's been a pleasure talking with you. I'm excited for what Macon has been able to do and certainly credit you, the mayor and the other members of your team for being creative and taking what was a hard situation in terms of looking at this facility that had seen better days and really reimagining it.

I think that's a benefit economically, socially, and like we said, our goal gives the community of Macon and others a real opportunity to gather. And I think that's really important. So congratulations. And I applaud your foresight.

Alex: Thank you so much, Brian.

Brian: Thanks for tuning into Season Five of Built! We have more great stories coming up…and our next one debuts in two weeks. 

Brian: And if you missed an episode from the first four seasons, go listen! You can find all Built episodes wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, please give us a rating or review on whichever podcast platform you use. 

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial and PRX Productions. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode of Built was produced by Emmanuel Desarme. Our Senior Producer and editor is Genevieve Sponsler. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel. 

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. 

I’m Brian Maughan. 

And remember, every story is unique, every property is individual, but we’re all part of this BUILT world.