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Champs Sports is making a major statement with its newest store.
On April 1 the sports retailer quietly opened the doors to Champs Sports Homefield, a 35,000-square-foot store in Pembroke Pines, Fla., offering a wide range of experiences and expanded product categories.
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The store is the largest of any within the Foot Locker Inc. family, its parent, and will serve as a prototype for future Champs Sports units.
Champs concentrates primarily on young athletes and Homefield offers them a supersized group of experiences targeted to them, but this store is expected to appeal to older shoppers as well. Its grand opening is set for April 22.
The store features a basketball court, a digital VR experience that mimics a Combine, a smoothie bar and a health and wellness department. There’s also a larger assortment of apparel and sneakers for a wide range of sports including running, weight training, and yoga, as well as equipment. Top brands include Nike, Adidas, Under Armour and Jordan Brand as well as private labels Eastbay Performance, CSG and Cozi.
“This is brand new for us and is the biggest Foot Locker Inc. store on the planet,” said Guy Harkless, senior vice president and general manager of Champs Sports and Eastbay. “But we felt we needed it as a solution for the modern athlete.” Homefield is intended to serve the “whole life journey” of its customers, he added, not just sell product.
The average Champs Sports store measures 5,500 square feet, about the same size as the 5,000 square feet dedicated to true performance product in the center of Homefield. That includes cleats for a variety of sports along with basketball and running shoes.
Although all of Champs’ 500-plus stores offer performance product, the store sells a number of new footwear brands including Brooks, Hoka and Asics, he said, along with 2XU training apparel and sunglasses and visors from Oakley to complement the Nike, Under Armour and New Balance assortment.
Homefield also offers “a ton of new categories,” he said. “We don’t sell protein powders in normal Champs stores.”
The store’s half-court basketball court will allow visitors to shoot baskets and work on their ball-handling skills and will also be the spot for yoga or HIIT classes, he said.
The smoothie bar will serve ReFuel Your Game with Smoothie 123, and the 2,500-square-foot health and wellness area features nutritional and recovery foods and products such as “muscle foods” from GNC, Harkless said, as well as recovery guns from Hyperice and recovery sandals from Oofos.