Voit to Sever Its Last Tie With Orange County

The Voit Athletic Equipment Co., founded in Los Angeles in the early 1900s and headquartered in Orange County from 1958 until 1984, will sever its last tie with the county when its national distribution center in Buena Park is moved to Sparks, Nev., on Sept. 1. The company said the new center in Nevada will employ up to 45 workers.

The sporting goods company’s presence in Orange County has been diminishing since the early 1980s, when increasing overseas competition began cutting into its business. Voit once employed more than 850 workers at a 700,000-square-foot manufacturing plant and corporate headquarters facility in Santa Ana.

But the operation, pared down to only about 100 workers, was moved to Buena Park after a series of layoffs that started in the late 1970s when the company began importing all of its inflatable balls from the Far East. In 1984, when Voit was sold by its parent, AMF Inc., the company’s headquarters once again moved, this time to Rochester, N.Y., where Voit’s current parent, the Reltron Corp., is headquartered.