The Brooklyn Nets are ditching their traditional outdoor practice for something new this year: a four-hour, free indoor fan festival at Crown Heights' Major Owens Community Center. Nets Fest runs from noon to 4 p.m. Sunday, October 4, and swaps out the open team workout for meet-and-greets, autograph sessions, panels, skills competitions, children's activities, live entertainment and a vendor village featuring local businesses and Brooklyn-based food. It marks the first time in nearly a decade that the franchise's open-to-the-public event will take place indoors rather than on a playground court.
According to the New York Daily News, the team describes the shift as an experiment rather than a permanent break from tradition. The organization said it wanted to try a different format and create more direct interaction between fans and players, and it plans to evaluate how Nets Fest goes before deciding on next year's format. The event will also feature former players alongside the current roster, something the team is billing as a “reimagined experience” designed to bring fans closer to players and alumni, per the same report.
The move comes even though last year's Practice in the Park, held at Potomac Playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant, drew the highest attendance for an open practice in franchise history, according to the organization as cited by the Daily News. That event traces back to 2017, when Practice in the Park launched at Brooklyn Bridge Park as an open team workout wrapped in a block-party atmosphere. It moved to Potomac Playground in 2024 and returned there in 2025, incorporating concerts, youth basketball, celebrity games, giveaways and community programming along the way.
From Waterfront Crowds to Smaller Neighborhood Gatherings
Attendance for the franchise's open-to-the-public event has swung dramatically over the years. The gathering peaked in October 2022 at an estimated 8,000 fans at Pier 2 in Brooklyn Bridge Park during the team's superstar era, according to Sports Illustrated, compared to roughly 2,500 attendees at more recent outdoor events in Bed-Stuy. Last year's Potomac Playground edition leaned into local rivalries, featuring a streetball matchup between Bed-Stuy's Zone 6 and East New York's Gersh Park along with the traditional “jersey off our backs” giveaway to local youth, as detailed by BKReader.
This year's indoor venue brings its own history. The Major Owens Health & Wellness Community Center at 1561 Bedford Avenue opened in October 2021 inside the retrofitted 60,000-square-foot drill shed of the historic 1908 Bedford Union Armory, according to CBS News. The facility includes three regulation basketball courts, a 25-meter six-lane swimming pool and an indoor multi-sport turf field operated by Asphalt Green, per the center's own description. Hoodline previously covered the venue's community role when it hosted the Brooklyn Basketball Classic youth tournament in August.
Part of a Bigger Investment Push by BSE Global
The format change lands as Nets parent company BSE Global continues pouring resources into Brooklyn basketball infrastructure. In September 2025, the organization opened the 18,600-square-foot Brooklyn Basketball Training Center at 140 Flatbush Avenue, directly across from Barclays Center, to expand year-round youth athletic programming, according to a release from BSE Global. That expansion sits alongside the company's ongoing $140 million renovation of Barclays Center itself, which included debuting new premium and fan spaces such as the Gallagher Terrace and Modelo Bridge ahead of the 2025-26 season, as Hoodline reported in its arena renovation coverage.
Ticketmaster served as the presenting sponsor for Sunday's Nets Fest, with free tickets distributed through local merchant groups including the Tompkins Avenue Merchant Association, according to a Wire Report item on the event. The festival also arrives during a season of organizational milestones: the Nets are celebrating their 60th season, tracing back to the franchise's 1967 origins as a charter member of the American Basketball Association under the name New Jersey Americans, before it moved to Long Island in 1968 and joined the NBA in 1976, per Wikipedia. Head coach Jordi Fernández, hired in April 2024 as the franchise's 24th NBA head coach, signed a multi-year contract extension with his assistant coaching staff this past April, according to YES Network.
Why This Weekend, and What Happens Next
Nets Fest's Sunday date places it within a crowded and uncoordinated stretch of major public gatherings converging on Crown Heights this fall, landing alongside separate cultural and botanical events in the neighborhood, per a report from FoundTheMove. For central Brooklyn hubs, hosting multiple high-volume events in the weeks following Labor Day has become something of a seasonal pattern, the outlet noted.
Whatever happens Sunday, the Nets say the event itself is a test. The team will assess Nets Fest after it wraps, and Brooklyn's response is expected to help decide whether an open team practice sits at the center of next fall's event or whether the indoor festival format sticks around, according to the Daily News report. For now, fans heading to Crown Heights this weekend will find autographs, skills competitions and a Brooklyn marketplace of nonprofits and local vendors in place of the familiar sight of Nets players running drills on an outdoor court.
