Trending
There's something special happening at The Highlands. And it's benefiting the entire county.
Each weekend, thousands of folks from out of the region are traveling to the Highlands Sports Complex for a variety of events. Consider a weekend earlier this month: there was a basketball tournament and a dance competition going on the same weekend. The parking lot at the Sport Complex was filled; the parking area in front of Kohl's department store also was filled, with additional overflow parking happening by Marquee Cinemas.
It's all become par for the course at the complex.
"We are busy every weekend. We have tournaments whether it's basketball tournaments, wrestling, cheerleading; we have tournaments every weekend bringing in between 1,000 to 2,000 people," Sports Complex General Manager Harvey Greenridge said.
The visitors also are driving additional business at The Highlands. At the recent basketball/dance events, most of those attending were in Wheeling both Saturday and Sunday. Surely they ate dinner Saturday evening at one of the many restaurants at the development, and may even have booked a hotel room for an overnight stay, particularly with gas prices being high.
That supported local jobs and also led to additional tax dollars being created. That's exactly the type of economic activity members of the Ohio County Development Authority envisioned when it moved to create the complex just a few short years ago.
"It has always been our hope that not only would it be a facility that was booked up every weekend, bringing hundreds of thousands of people to The Highlands, but that it would be a catalyst for bringing people to shop, stay, and in turn, get them back," Ohio County Commissioner Randy Wharton said. "I'm not sure we're up to that potential, even post-COVID, but we're certainly working to get up to that point."
That's a promising statement for The Highland's future. Keep up the hard work.