For the past few days, craftsmen of all kinds have been busy transforming a former pharmaceutical factory in the north of the city into a laboratory for Loire basketball and an alternative urban development project to shopping centres. The professional club Abeille des Aydes (ADA) Blois Basket, which has been playing in the elite since this season, will soon have a “performance center”.
Unique equipment, which will belong to him, and where four covered training grounds, offices and accommodation, a fitness area, a themed restaurant and a medical center staffed with private practitioners will coexist. A school support activity will also be deployed. It must be believed that the ADA Blois was also a little tired of paying to train in its current equipment, the Tennis court. Inaugurated in 2017, this design sports and cultural complex built on wasteland by the community hosts all the home matches of the professional club. But also, and above all, his daily training sessions. Each use is billed to him. “Thanks to our structuring project, the savings in rent for training should be around 100,000 euros per year”, rejoices the president of the club and boss of the local Medef, Paul Seignolle.
Project at 8.5 million euros
The club will no longer need to rent offices or even to accommodate its young people from the training center to the hotel, i.e. 96,000 euros more in the purse. So much money likely to be injected into the recruitment of great players, a necessary but not sufficient condition for maintaining the club in Betclic Elite. Although local companies, whose match subscriptions already account for 40% of ticket sales, are invited to act as investors in this 8.5 million euro project, the latter remains heavily subsidized by the city, the conurbation and the Centre-Val de Loire region. They all find their interest in it.
Christophe Degruelle, president of Agglopolys, the agglomeration community of Blois, wants to put an end to the appetite for supermarkets in front of each new industrial wasteland appearing at the gates of the city. He remembers a recent controversy where the owner of a new commercial area, planted just opposite the future performance center, had had sixty-six fine trees felled to “improve visibility” of its signs. “Without opposing economic changes, I try to prevent an industrial zone from turning into a commercial zone. »
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