Mountainside Fitness, Tempe, AZ, will renovate two spaces in Chase Field, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks Major League Baseball team, to create a 13,000-square-foot fitness center, which is expected to open next spring. Photo courtesy of Mountainside Fitness.

Mountainside Fitness has found a unique way to market itself and be seen by about 2 million people each year.

After a year of negotiating and planning, Mountainside Fitness, Tempe, AZ, has signed a deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks Major League Baseball team and the county of Maricopa, AZ, to rent 13,000 square feet at Chase Field, the ballpark for the Diamondbacks, for use as a Mountainside Fitness center, says Billy Malkovich, CEO at Mountainside. The Chase Field facility is expected to open in spring 2012.

As a Diamondbacks sponsor, Mountainside, which has nine locations, already had a sign at Chase Field and sent trainers to the ballpark a few times each week to lead boot camps for Diamondbacks office staff. However, the Diamondbacks wanted to offer more fitness options to its staff, and Mountainside wanted to make its brand more active, which led to the idea of a club within the ballpark.

“It went from being a cool idea to something that, from a marketing standpoint, no one had ever done before,” Malkovich says. “It was a way for us to change the game in sports marketing.”

The company will go from having a static sign in the ballpark to having a fully functioning club in which the 2 million people per year who come to a Diamondbacks game can see the club, walk through it and really get to know Mountainside, he says.

For the deal to happen, Mountainside needed approval from Major League Baseball and the county, which the Diamondbacks helped the fitness company secure. Mountainside will not receive funding from the county or the Diamondbacks for the project. Instead, the company will spend $1 million to renovate and equip two areas of the concourse, one on top of the other, that are not in use.

That is far less than Mountainside typically spends to build its 40,000-square-foot suburban clubs from the ground up. At those facilities, the equipment alone generally runs $1 million. However, on a cost-per-square-foot basis, the expense for the Chase Field location is higher than typical Mountainside clubs but worth it because of the opportunities it provides, Malkovich says.

The move, he adds, will make Mountainside one of the only fitness centers in downtown Phoenix, which is comprised of mostly business traffic, although some residential housing has been built in recent years. It provides a place to work out for Mountainside’s suburban members who work downtown, and it allows the company to reach new membership possibilities in downtown workers and baseball fans, Malkovich says.

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