New pickleball center set for southeast Fort Collins

FORT COLLINS — Two families are planning an indoor-outdoor center for “serious pickleball players” that they hope to open in late spring or early summer next year in a southeast Fort Collins space that had been home to a call center.

“We want to do something very local, designed to provide something for the community,” said Neil Bellefeuille, one of the partners in Pickleball Ventures LLC who have acquired half of a 64,784-square-foot flex industrial building at 4401 Innovation Drive that had been home to the Qualfon call center. “We’re hoping to be able to keep the costs and price as low as possible, which is not easy in Fort Collins because real estate is expensive here.”

The plan is for 11 indoor and six outdoor pickleball courts at the center, which is west of Timberline Road and north of Harmony Road, Bellefeuille said.

“We want to focus highly on people who are committed players, those who play three or more times a week,” he said. “We’ll be able to roll up the garage doors in nice weather so it doesn’t feel like a shoebox. There’ll be a second-floor mezzanine for viewing, and two courts can be converted to one to host regional or national events.”

The center will have a coffee bar and grab-and-go cafe, but Bellefeuille said, “we’re trying to strike the middle of the market.” On one end are franchises such as the Chicken and Pickles chain of centers that include full-service restaurants, bars, games, events and community gathering spaces, he said, and “the other end of the market is super-simple; you take over an old big-box store, put some courts in and sell memberships.”

Bellefeuille is joined in the partnership by his wife, Amy, plus Mike Zervas and his wife, Cindy. Other family members also have invested in the company. Bellefeuille is a partner and design strategist at Fort Collins-based consulting firm BILD, and Zervas ran a business that franchised grab-and-go food concepts.

They’ve come up with the tentative name Zero Zero Two for the center, representing the score at the beginning of every pickleball game, “because it represents a fresh start where anything can happen,” Bellefeuille said. However, he told BizWest on Monday that there may be a trademark conflict that could force the partners to pick a different or modified brand.

Architectural sketches from Randy Shortridge at Fort Collins-based [au]Workshop have been completed for the partners’ 36,000-square-foot half of the building, and nine general contractors expressed interest in bidding to build out the space, Bellefeuille said.