The final beam went up on Jonesboro's new sports complex the same day the A&P Commission revealed the name on it. The building will not open until 2027, and the name is already taken.
On June 25, the Jonesboro Advertising & Promotion Commission and First Community Bank announced a 15-year, $4.5 million naming-rights agreement that turns the Ridge Athletics Center into First Community Bank Sportsplex. The deal was unveiled at the topping-out ceremony, the moment a building's final beam is set, with the facility still months from its early-2027 opening. The roughly 200,000-square-foot building is designed to hold 12 basketball courts or 24 volleyball courts, a 40,000-square-foot natatorium (an indoor pool complex) with one-meter and three-meter diving boards and 1,245 spectator seats, a competition warm-up pool, an outdoor aquatics park, and a 35,000-square-foot events center.
The seller here is a public commission, and the buyer is a regional bank. For an investor, two things matter more than the name on the wall: who runs the building once it opens, and what a sale this early says about the kind of venue being built.
The Company Behind the Counter
The Sportsplex will be managed by The Sports Facilities Companies (SFC), a firm that runs sports, aquatics, and events venues for cities and developers. Its reach goes well beyond Jonesboro. The network spans more than 140 venues with roughly 7,000 team members, drawing close to 30 million guest visits and more than $1 billion in yearly economic activity, according to the company.
That reach changes how to read the deal. The public side is financing the building, but the day-to-day business of filling it, booking tournaments, running the pool, keeping the calendar full, will sit with a national operator whose entire business is making venues like this produce. The naming sale arrives before that operator has run a single event in the building. For an investor, the useful read starts with the model: a publicly financed venue, handed to a specialist manager, that is already being turned into bookable, sellable space before it opens.
Why the Name Sold This Early
Naming rights are easy to price after a venue has a track record. They are harder to price on a building still being framed, because the buyer is paying for a crowd that does not exist yet. Jonesboro priced it anyway, and the number gives the sale shape.
Craig Rickert, executive director of the A&P Commission, said the bank will pay $275,000 in the first year, then roughly $300,000 a year across the term, and will separately cover the front sign at about $100,000. That is real money attached to an asset with no operating history, which is the point. Selling a 15-year commitment at that level before opening reads as a wager on the traffic the building is expected to draw, made before any attendance data exists to test it. A sponsor making that bet this early is a vote of confidence in the projections the whole project runs on.
First Community Bank is a regional lender with 34 locations across Arkansas and southern Missouri, and Jonesboro sits inside the market it already serves. For a bank like that, the value is repetition in front of an audience it already has. Every tournament weekend would put the same name in front of the families, coaches, visiting teams, and local business owners the bank is already trying to reach. That logic is why the natural buyer for a building like this is a community lender rather than a national brand.
Where the Naming Money Sits
The naming deal is meaningful, and it is one defined stream inside a much larger structure. The build has been reported at about $77 million, and the public RFP laid out a structure financed mainly through tax-exempt municipal bonds (money the city borrows and repays over time), backed by the building's future lease payments, with a prepared-food tax (a tax on restaurant and takeout meals) as the primary source for rent and operating costs. The naming-rights revenue sits alongside that public-finance structure.
At roughly $300,000 a year against a building that cost tens of millions to put up and will carry significant annual operating costs, the naming stream is a steady, defined contribution to a structure that runs on much larger sources. The commission's prepared-food-tax account, the account that actually funds the Sportsplex, held about $7.7 million as of late June. What the naming deal adds beyond the dollars is a private proof point: a company looked at the projections and was willing to write a 15-year check against them, before the public side has a single attendance figure to point to.
What Could Stall This
The risk that matters most sits below the naming deal entirely, in the tax base that supports the whole project.
The model depends on the prepared-food tax and lease revenue performing well enough to make the bond payments and cover operations, and that performance is tied to the same regional traffic the building is being built to attract. If the tournaments and events underdeliver, the pressure appears likely to land on the public-finance side first, where the dollars are large, well before it reaches the naming stream, where they are comparatively small. The RFP set the goal of reducing or eliminating an operating subsidy, which is a careful way of naming the thing that could go wrong: a venue like this can need ongoing public money if the traffic does not show up. A sign out front does not change the financing structure underneath it.
Takeaways for Investors
The Operator Is the Part to Watch
A publicly financed venue handed to a 140-venue national manager is a setup that keeps recurring across the space. How operators like SFC turn public facilities into booked, marketed, revenue-producing assets is a cleaner read on the model than any single naming headline.
Pre-Opening Rights Sales Set a Benchmark
Jonesboro put a number on commercial value before the building opened. Other public sports projects now have a reference point when they ask a sponsor to commit ahead of traffic data.
Local Banks Are the Natural Buyers
A community lender does not need national reach for this kind of deal to work. It needs market overlap, repeated family exposure, and a venue that hosts more than one kind of event, which is exactly what a regional sportsplex offers.
Sponsorship Sits Beside the Public Money
The naming check is one defined stream running next to the bonds, taxes, and bookings. Reading it as the thing that funds the building, or dismissing it because it does not, both miss how the pieces fit together.
