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Former Crescent Elementary repurposed as Innovation and Sports Center with baseball, robotics and golf simulators
Summary
District officials showed the board the repurposed Crescent Elementary — renamed the Innovation and Sports Center — featuring an indoor turf hitting/pitching facility, robotics competition space, golf simulators and planned esports/broadcast rooms; coaches and sponsors described youth programming and facility access.
The Council Bluffs Community School District showed trustees the newly repurposed Crescent Elementary building on Wednesday, now rebranded as the Innovation and Sports Center and in active use for athletics, robotics and other student programs.
Mr. Hamilton described facilities work converting the former gym into a 34-by-65-foot indoor turf area enclosed with nets, configurable into three pitching or hitting lanes and storage for equipment. Tyler Britsky, identified as the head AL baseball coach, said the space provides a consistent, dedicated home for baseball and softball practices, youth hitting camps and feeder-program development and will save families money by offering free access for feeder programs when the high school teams are not using the facility.
Robotics sponsor Christy Arthur described three tournament-ready robotics fields and flexible classrooms that hosted a league during recent weeks. Arthur said the league gave more than 100 students multiple, local opportunities to practice inspections, document decision-making in engineering notebooks, and advance to state and national qualifiers; the district reported multiple teams qualifying for state and four teams advancing to the U.S. Open competition.
District staff also described golf-simulator installations using flight-tracking software (flight scope) and three simulators planned to be operational soon; staff said the golf simulator room would open around March 1. The district is evaluating adding a middle-school esports league, an eSports room using existing high-school equipment, and a broadcast/media lab using TriCasters and cameras for live events and streamed competitions. Staff noted access controls: badge readers are being added so coaches and sponsors can access spaces when buildings are open and automatic alarm scheduling is configured.
Staff said the board previously approved the facility name change; no new fiscal commitments were requested at the presentation. Board members and staff emphasized the multipurpose nature of the space and its expected benefits for participation, skill development and community partnerships.
