By Thomas Sellers Jr.
Despite a global pandemic, a stadium that once hosted teams from all around the world took major steps to a new era.
Since the summer, the new owners of the USA Stadium Complex have been making progress in transforming the campus into the future home of various baseball tournaments.
Upper Deck Sports, LLC made the purchase of the historic USA Stadium back in June along with GameDay Baseball in Cordova.
“Last year there weren’t a lot of things we hadn’t envision for the campus and for the whole park. Most of that is not exactly how we envisioned it.
“We had to make several right and left turns and go over which way we could. Right now we have four fields going in. Of course we have the two that were original to the park. We have fully turfed the big stadium field. We’re in the process of doing some minor renovations to the stadium itself. There are a lot of things we want to do and will do. We were not able to get to all of that just yet because of a lot of things associated with COVID and things like that.”
Upper Deck Sports, LLC, is a four-person group that reportedly invested about $5 million into the two facilities. Upper Deck Sports is a private firm and bought USA Stadium from the City of Millington. The longtime Flag City venue was once home of the U.S. Baseball Olympic team from 1986-96. It was the training site for the team before heading to Seoul, South Korea; Barcelona, Spain and Atlanta, Ga.
“The outfield looks absolutely gorgeous and you can thank Kevin and Johnny Ray for most of that. They’ve worked just tirelessly to pull this thing all together. The other field we’ve turfed the infield and we’re leaving the grass outfield. We’re in the process of building two more fully turfed fields. We’ll be adding lights to them as soon as we can so that we will have just an incredible complex. Then the long term plan is to add other buildings, concession stands and those kinds of things that will make it just a fun place for kids to come and play and bring their family. We have a great vision for that.”
