Tustin Store to Follow New Rule in Sporting Goods: Big Is Better

The move is toward bigness, says Jim Chick as he plans to open one of Orange County’s largest sporting goods stores in the Tustin Market Place on Aug. 3. Market Place managers originally tried to get Chick’s Sporting Goods to take a smaller space--35,000 square feet instead of 50,000 square feet--but Chick convinced them that they would be making a mistake to opt for a mid-size store.

“They want something that is going to draw from a large area, and I told them that the state of the art in my industry now is 50,000 square feet,” said Chick, president of the sporting goods business founded by his father in 1949.

The Tustin store will be the sixth Chick’s Sporting Goods outlet in Southern California. Ten years ago, the Chick’s sporting goods store in Covina was the largest in the area at 22,000 square feet, Chick said.

Chick says medium-size sporting goods stores are quickly disappearing. “It’s breaking down into two types of stores: the megastore where you see everything in one place, and specialty stores where all the guys sells, say, are tennis rackets,” he said.

Jeff Schmitz used to run a small chain of tennis specialty stores and now manages the tennis department of Go Sports at the Fashion Island mall in Newport Beach. “The trend is definitely going this way, to large stores with a lot of specialty people,” he said. “If you can get a specialist in each department, you can really do some damage.”