The Dallas Wings’ season opener, a marquee match-up against the Indiana Fever, isn’t until May, but the team will start gearing up for preseason and practices soon. Except it looks like players won’t be practicing at their promised training facility in west Oak Cliff. The facility is still in construction limbo — in fact, construction hasn’t started yet.
We were excited when Dallas City Hall announced its plans to bring the Wings to the convention center downtown. But as the season draws closer, it looks like the team won’t be coming to Dallas anytime soon.
Over the summer, we raised concerns about the City Council’s decision to spend $55 million on a training facility for the team in west Oak Cliff, eight miles from downtown. The appeal of the Wings is that they will hopefully seize a moment in women’s sports, draw visitors to Dallas and, ideally, contribute to a reimagined downtown. It’s hard to rationalize a training facility so far away from the team’s downtown arena, especially with such a hefty price tag.
In an ideal world, the practice facility would be at the convention center where the team will play. But Dallas isn’t an ideal world.
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In June, the city explained that delays with the convention center redevelopment meant it wouldn’t be ready until at least 2027. Meanwhile, the city had signed a contract with the Wings promising a practice facility in time for the 2026 season. That sent the City Council searching for alternative locations, and Joey Georgusis Park in west Oak Cliff entered the conversation.
Except now it looks like the practice facility won’t be ready until 2027 either.
It’s a classic Dallas story. The city promises something will be completed in time for a deadline, only for it to inevitably be delayed.
At the Sept. 23 meeting of the ad hoc committee on professional sports recruitment and retention, city officials sounded confident they could deliver the practice facility in just a few months. They even mentioned ways to potentially fast-track construction, like using a prefabricated steel structure that could be dropped onto the site.
Now the city appears to have backed itself into a corner ahead of the looming spring 2026 deadline. City officials told us they are continuing discussions with the Wings about delivering the facility.
If the practice facility won’t be ready until 2027 anyway, couldn’t the city have waited for the completion of the convention center redevelopment to host the WNBA games and serve as the team’s training site? Might that have saved the city some money in the long run? What was the rush to identify a new practice facility location if it was destined to face the same delays?
The Wings are taking off, but their ascent in Dallas is taking longer than expected.
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