A Baltimore-founded sports company that built its business on pickup games and post-match beers is setting up shop in downtown Jacksonville, with plans to fill two of the city's highest-profile riverfront lots with soccer and volleyball leagues. Volo Sports announced it is starting operations in the city, targeting empty grass at Riverfront Plaza and a city-owned parcel at 330 E. Bay St. that once held the Duval County Courthouse.
Volo Sports entered the Jacksonville market by acquiring local operator Jax Fray, according to the Jacksonville Daily Record. The company plans to offer soccer and volleyball leagues at Riverfront Plaza, and soccer and grass volleyball leagues at 330 E. Bay St., a lot that has sat largely empty since the courthouse there was demolished in 2019. Volo describes its target customer as past athletes and social athletes rather than elite competitors, and its lineup of activities stretches well beyond field sports to include basketball, softball, skee-ball, bar trivia, cornhole and bocce.
The company got its start in 2010 with a single bocce league of 16 players, and has since grown into an operation serving more than 500,000 players nationwide, per the same report. Players can join as individuals or in small groups through pay-for-play participation, sign up as full teams with an entry fee, or purchase a Volo Pass subscription that allows play in any of the company's 16 operating cities, which currently include New York, Boston, Miami and Washington, D.C. Every league, the Daily Record notes, wraps into a social experience after the games end.
A CEO Who Already Knew the Brand
Jacksonville's interest in Volo runs through Downtown Investment Authority CEO Colin Tarbert, who became aware of the company during his two decades in Baltimore before taking the DIA's top job. Tarbert said Volo Sports can transform underutilized spaces into destinations, and framed the company's arrival as a broader vote of confidence in downtown's trajectory. He said Volo's investment signals that national companies want to participate in downtown Jacksonville's transformation, according to the Daily Record.
Tarbert was unanimously selected by the Downtown Investment Authority board in June 2025 to become its CEO starting that August, replacing retiring CEO Lori Boyer, according to a separate Jacksonville Daily Record report on his hiring. He previously served as President and CEO of the Baltimore Development Corporation, giving him firsthand familiarity with Volo before the company ever set foot in Florida.
Riverfront Plaza and a Contested Courthouse Site
Volo's chosen venues sit at the center of downtown Jacksonville's riverfront overhaul. Riverfront Plaza's $38 million Phase 1 opened on the Northbank in December, bringing a rooftop playground, café pavilion and event lawn to the six-acre site of the demolished Jacksonville Landing — a project Hoodline covered at its grand opening. A $40 million Phase 2 is slated for completion in late 2027, and updated designs unveiled in May include a shaded riverfront swing deck, a full-service beer garden restaurant and a pedestrian ramp linking the park directly to the Main Street Bridge, according to Resident News.
The 330 E. Bay St. parcel, meanwhile, sits within a larger city-owned property where the Downtown Investment Authority approved a 180-day negotiation window in April for a $160 million proposal from Corner Lot and Aspect Real Estate Group. That plan calls for a 14-story hotel, conference space and a 50,000-square-foot Culinary Institute of America campus. How Volo's adult league schedules will mesh with ongoing Phase 2 construction and that commercial redevelopment next door remains an open question as both projects move forward on parallel tracks.
A Free Youth Program Alongside the Pay-to-Play Leagues
Beyond its adult leagues, Volo Sports also offers a free Volo Kids program, and the nonprofit Volo Kids Foundation is expected to extend that community impact throughout Jacksonville, according to Nayla Bautista, a Volo Sports spokesperson quoted in the Daily Record's reporting. Nationally, the foundation has engaged more than 70,000 children and mobilized 15,000 volunteer coaches across eight U.S. cities, offering free six-week sessions that include uniforms, equipment and healthy snacks, per Business Wire.
That free model lands at a moment when youth sports costs have become a real barrier for families: research from the Aspen Institute's Project Play found that the average cost of youth sports participation in the United States jumped 46% between 2019 and 2024. Volo's structure, pairing revenue from adult pay-to-play leagues with a free kids program, gives the company a built-in answer to that affordability squeeze even as it builds out a business aimed at reinvigorating underused neighborhoods.
Riding a National Wave of Adult League Growth
Jacksonville's new leagues arrive amid a broader surge in demand for adult recreational sports. U.S. adult participation in organized team sports climbed to 19% in 2025, up from 11% in 2020, with 47% of Gen Z adults and 31% of Millennials expressing interest in joining recreational leagues, according to data from Sports Facilities Companies. Volo has moved aggressively to capture that demand, acquiring rival ZogSports — the country's second-largest adult social sports platform, with more than 120,000 players — in June 2025 to build what it calls the largest social recreational sports network in the country.
That growth has been fueled by $21 million in private equity funding from Bluestone Equity Partners, which helped push Volo's annual registrations past 750,000 across more than 4,500 leagues and drove revenue above $40 million by early 2026, according to PitchBook. The Jacksonville expansion is Volo's latest bet that downtown lots cleared for redevelopment, and not yet fully built out, can double as instant activity hubs while bigger construction projects catch up around them. City officials have already been searching for an operator to run the beer garden planned for Riverfront Plaza, a role Hoodline reported the city was seeking to fill just weeks before Volo's announcement.
-4.webp?w=160&h=400&fit=crop&crop=edges)
