Thousands of athletes, families, and fans head to the Homefield Showcase Center in Kansas City, Kansas, each weekend. This $60 million, 150,000-square-foot sports facility opened its doors in 2024 and regularly hosts world-class tournaments for competitive youth travel leagues.
Homefield was founded in 2019 and has quickly expanded its facilities and programming to offer services that help athletes grow as players and individuals.
The Challenge
When Homefield was planning its new Showcase Center tournament facility, its top priority was delivering a differentiated experience to visitors.
“The youth travel sports space is growing, but many facilities haven’t kept pace from an experience perspective. If a team and their families spend hours traveling here, we want to give them a reason to come back,” said Kelce Ahern, Homefield’s Director of Operations. “We wanted the Showcase Center to stand out from everything else.”
To do that, they wanted to deliver something on par with pro sports. But with 10 games happening on 10 courts with 10 different scoreboards, the question was: How can Homefield create a production value that makes every court feel like they’re in a one-court arena?
And more importantly, how could every one of those games make it easy for families and fans to follow the action and see their team’s scoreboard and athlete stats clearly?
Enter Mike Scott, a senior account manager at AVI Systems and long-time tournament sports Dad. When Scott heard that Homefield was building a new facility, he contacted Homefield to offer his expertise in audiovisual implementations.
The Solution
After winning a competitive bid for the project, Scott partnered with Henderson Engineers, the project’s design engineers, to propose an AV solution and serve as a systems integrator.
The impact starts as you walk into the Showcase Center’s main lobby and are greeted by a 2 X 2 LCD video wall that shares details about what’s happening that day.
On the tournament floor, a combination of 65” and 85” LCD display scoreboards are mounted back-to-back above each court in a V-shaped pattern, allowing maximum visibility.
“As a sports parent myself, I knew this detail was critical,” said Scott. “The way the displays are mounted allows you to see the score, player stats, and time on the clock. It’s a huge experience upgrade from many tournaments where scores and stats are kept by a parent in the stands.”
Surface-mount speakers are mounted on the ceilings throughout the facility, making it easy to play pre-game hype music or make announcements.
In the Showcase Center’s restaurant area, additional displays and audio allow fans to watch the game while they grab a bite to eat. And because each game is live-streamed, you can switch the displays from one court to another. 
Finally, Homefield equipped a series of conference rooms with videoconferencing capabilities for sponsors, coaches, and teams.
“AVI was able to take multiple technologies and make them work together seamlessly. Their expertise is what bridges the gap between each piece of hardware and software,” says Ahern.
The Results Human Impact
From the start, the Homefield team received great feedback on the technology deployed in the Showcase Center. In their very first tournament, they had teams that traveled from as far west as Las Vegas and as far east as Florida. When even those who traveled a long distance said, “We’re coming back immediately,” Homefield knew they’d achieved their goals.
“We set out to create the best tournament facility in the country. We had to make sure we worked with partners that could achieve that with us, and that’s why we went with AVI Systems,” said Ahern. “They gave us a way to have that visual and audio experience where someone walks away feeling how Kansas City and Homefield is different from anyone else.”
