When Sports Authority filed for bankruptcy protection in March, company executives believed they could still possibly right the ship.
They’d have to close some under-performing stores — including the iconic Sportscastle that Denver’s Gart family first transformed into a sports emporium in 1971 — and cut deals with creditors, but they’d emerge leaner and better able to compete in an Amazon-style retail world.
“I know there is a great company here,” CEO Michael Foss said at the time in an exclusive interview with The Denver Post.
By the end of the year, Sports Authority was gone.
Thousands of Coloradans lost their jobs — at Sports Authority’s corporate headquarters in Englewood and at its 31 retail outposts throughout the state.
Today, the only remnants of the retailer that could trace its roots in Colorado back to Gart Bros. Sporting Goods are hundreds of thousands of square feet of empty big-box retail space and the Sports Authority Field at Mile High signs still emblazoned across the Denver Broncos’ stadium.
Neither of those are long for this world. Other retailers, including Bed Bath & Beyond and REI, have begun snapping up the best real estate and more announcements are sure to come in 2017.
The Broncos haven’t set a timetable to find a new naming rights partner, but you better believe the reigning Super Bowl champs don’t want to play a second straight season in a stadium bearing the name of a company that no longer exists.
Read the rest of the top business stories of 2016
- Amazon and Colorado make peace
- Vail buys Whistler Blackcomb
- Voters lift minimum wage
- Towns get creative to solve high country housing crisis
- Chipotle’s less-than-healthy recovery
- Internet shakes up how we watch TV
- A new era for Molson Coors
- R.I.P. Sports Authority
- Cybersecurity firms gain investment as hacks proliferate
- Overtourism becomes an issue
- Denver home prices stay hot, but rent gains cooling
- Energy outlook brightens