Driving Quality for 95 Years
Nidy Sports Construction builds surfaces for work and play
If you play shuffleboard or tennis in Florida, chances are you have played on a court either originally built or resurfaced by Nidy Sports Construction. And your favorite collegiate or high school sports team may be playing on a field built by this same design-build company located in Longwood, Florida.
Started in 1924 by the Nidy family, Nidy Sports Construction originally focused on tennis and shuffleboard construction and maintenance, where it earned an enviable reputation. With a change of ownership in 2007, the company expanded its scope of services and now offers complete construction or restoration of running tracks, synthetic turf fields for football, soccer and baseball, and courts for shuffleboard, pickleball, tennis, volleyball, basketball, putting greens and bocce ball.
The company has installed synthetic turf at indoor facilities for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the University of Florida Gators, the Florida State University Seminoles, the University of Miami Hurricanes and other professional and college teams. Other recently completed projects in Florida include replacing the turf field at Daytona Stadium in Daytona Beach, building eight pickleball courts with lighting at Coehadjoe Park in Ocala, and resurfacing six tennis courts at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.
Nidy Sports Construction offers expertise in the ever-growing sports construction industry, and over the past 10 years has contracted larger and larger jobs, forging relationships with a majority of local and regional construction managers. It is also the only contractor that will tackle all of the abovementioned sports—most contractors offer only one or two sports, but Nidy Sports Construction offers the full line. In addition, the company is vertically integrated, self-performing a majority of the work to ensure a quality product for the end user.
A Leader in Sports Construction
Known for high-quality workmanship, the company has spent the last 95 years building a reputation for competence, communication and innovation—striving to bring technical expertise, creativity and ingenuity to each project. The firm has about 35 employees and performs work mostly in Florida, but also has done projects in Georgia and South Carolina, says General Manager Zach Stevenson, who has been with the company since 2014.
Customers include construction managers, homebuilders, property managers, public and private schools, universities and colleges, private clubs and professional organizations. The team is proud to have partnered with major sports general contractors on many of its projects.
The biggest project Nidy Sports Construction has completed is the Deputy Scott Pine Community Park, which opened in February 2018 in Windermere, Florida, says Jonathan Papp, project manager and estimator, who joined the company in 2016. Named for an Orange County police officer who was killed in the line of duty in 2014, the park was a joint venture between Orange County Public Schools and Orange County Parks and Recreation. Designed and constructed for $9.7 million, the 19.5-acre park includes a 3-acre multipurpose field and the 8-acre Windermere High School football stadium, which features a state-of-the-art rubberized track encircling a synthetic turf field. “We were happy and fortunate to be part of this job,” Papp says. “It is a great local venue that many people will use and see.”
He adds, “We did well on this project and have since contracted several other projects with the same general contractor. While this is the largest job we have done to date, we have some larger jobs that are either in progress or under contract.”
A Range of Expertise
Nidy Sports Construction was acquired in 2007 by Mike Vinton, former President of The Vasco Group (Vasco), a commercial paving and sports field/facility construction company based in Massillon, Ohio. Vinton recognized the value of the Nidy name, kept it, and strategically began adding outdoor sports amenities. He retired in 2015 and was replaced by current President and owner Matt Savage, who had been with Vasco since 2004. The parent company is now Visionary Holding Company, Inc., under which Vasco and Nidy Sports Construction are both subsidiaries.
Sometimes people are confused about Nidy Sports Construction’s areas of expertise, Papp says. “A lot of times they have a look on their face like, ‘What is sports construction?’ They are thinking of full construction of big stadiums or something like that. We work on those types of projects too, but just on certain components, such as installing the courts and fields,” he explains.
On football, soccer and baseball fields, beneath the synthetic turf is a pretty sophisticated undergirding system, Stevenson says. “The look and feel of the field is only as good as what’s beneath it,” he adds.
“A good analogy is you look at a wall and you see paint on it, but what is behind it?”
The company has only been installing turf for about a year, but has been doing the site and civil engineering work—actually building the field before the infill and carpet go on it—since 2012.
Nidy Sports Construction became more construction-centric with the new ownership in 2007. “That’s when we started building the courts instead of just surfacing them. A couple of years later we purchased our own paver, so we also pave in-house. We self-perform 80 to 90 percent of our work, and have really just been on a growth trajectory,” Stevenson says, adding that the company prides itself on being one-stop shop.
Stevenson points to stability as one of the major pluses for the company. “It has been a very stable company with three generations of the Nidy family owning it for 83 years. Now we are going on 12 years with the current ownership, keeping a strong family brand to preserve the legacy of the Nidy name,” he says.
A Reputation of Achievement
Customers come to Nidy Sports Construction “because of our reputation, our success with every project,” Stevenson says. “You can’t please everyone, but I can’t think of any large project we have built where the owner was dissatisfied or unhappy.” The company has been in business so long, Papp says, “that the people we do work for are either repeat customers or we’ve worked with them indirectly, or they’ve heard of us from someone else.”
“It’s like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” he continues jokingly, referring to a Hollywood-inspired parlor game based on the “six degrees of separation” theory suggesting every person (or in this case, every company) is linked by six or fewer acquaintances.
Stevenson adds, “Nidy has a reputation that precedes itself—and it’s a very enviable reputation here in the sports construction market. One of the things we hang our hat on is we build outstanding surfaces for work or play.”
Nidy Sports Construction may not always be the lowest bidder on a job, Stevenson says, but the company takes pride in delivering high-quality projects by using technologically advanced, precise equipment that delivers very tight tolerances. “We believe in using methods, tools, equipment and other innovations to give owners exactly what they’re paying for,” he affirms.
“We approach business the same way an athlete approaches sports,” Papp says. “We are a competitive group with an unbeatable game-on mentality. We take our work seriously because we want to create winning projects for our clients. Nothing about our performance is simply ‘good enough’ because we are not OK with the status quo. We achieve victory by going the extra mile.”