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Saints training camp moving to Shreveport as early as next season? Oh, hell, yeah!

Proposed complex includes plan for Saints training camp

Roy Lang III, rflang@gannett.com
Published 7:39 p.m. CT Aug. 22, 2017 | Updated 6:56 a.m. CT Aug. 23, 2017

Included in Shreveport Mayor Ollie Tyler's presentation to city council Tuesday about a proposed $30-million sports complex to anchor a $100-million-plus mixed-use development site on the north side of downtown was previously undisclosed information about city officials' hope to make the complex home to the New Orleans Saints training camp.

The main tenant in the 3,200-seat arena would be the future G-League team for the New Orleans Pelicans. However, the city also has its eye on the New Orleans Saints, an NFL franchise who owned by Tom Benson. Benson also owns the Pelicans.

In the drawings presented Tuesday are two football fields next to the arena labeled “Saints Practice Facility.”

According to local banker Rick Holland, who has helped broker a relationship between Shreveport and the Saints for more than 20 years, Mickey Loomis, the executive vice president of basketball operations for the Pelicans and general manager of the Saints, was in town three weeks ago to tour the proposed site for more than just his basketball team.

“(The proposal) has the fields and they are programming training camp in (the site),” Holland told The Times. “(The Saints) need 150 hotel rooms, 10 meeting rooms and two football fields.

“All you’d have to do to get camp next year is level that dirt (for the fields). The convention center says they can put an indoor turf field inside. The Saints can practice outside in the morning and inside in the afternoon. They don’t have to get on the bus to go anywhere – they’d go from their (hotel) rooms, to the meeting rooms to the practice fields.”

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