New Welcome & Tourism Center opens at Shawnee Sports Complex in Dunbar

Local officials gathered for a ribbon cutting at the facility Thursday evening at 1 Salango Way, Dunbar. Shawnee Sports Complex has fields for softball, baseball and football; courts for basketball and pickleball; a playground and a pool.

Building features

The 12,000 square-foot building replaces the former 2,500 square-foot building and creates a single entrance for the facility. The building features larger restrooms, a larger concession area and a ticketing office.

Upstairs, a wood-tiled patio area has a view of many of the fields that can be used for both football and soccer. Inside, there are new offices and two conference rooms for tournament officials, referees or whoever else needs them.

 �Quite frankly, when we opened the facility in 2018, we knew it'd be successful. We didn't know how successful it would be,� Salango said. “So when you start getting 15,000, 20,000 people in here, we didn't have sufficient restroom space and we didn't have sufficient concessions and meeting space.�

The building also serves as a weather shelter during storms.

Facility stats

The building cost $5 million. Former Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.Va., and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., secured $3 million in congressionally directed spending, and the state Department of Tourism, under former Gov. Jim Justice, contributed $1 million. The Kanawha County Commission put in the remaining $1 million.

Pray Construction out of Scott Depot started the project last August. The building was designed by ZMM Architects and Engineers out of ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä.

The complex opened in 2018. Since then, more than 200,000 people have come to the facility, Salango said. He added the complex has generated over $150 million in economic impact, in part because of more than 50,000 hotel rooms in the area that have been sold.

Salango said around 20 different sports leagues use the facility for both youth and adult sports.

Chelsea Ruby, state Tourism secretary, said that eight or nine years ago, people were not working on sports tourism projects.

“Right now you may be seeing county commissions all over the country trying to replicate this model and building similar facilities, but at the time when [Shawnee Sports Complex] was started, that wasn't being done in this region, and it certainly wasn't being done around here,� she said. “That is how we're growing the tourism economy in West Virginia, is to really look at those trends [and] be ahead of those trends…�