Building the West Coast's flagship high-altitude athlete village — for Olympians, professional teams, adventure athletes, mission-support users and the town that hosts them. Four complementary facilities, one walkable downtown, one operator.
One mountain village. Four complementary facilities. One performance ecosystem.
01 — The North Star
National Sports Alliance is developing an interconnected high-altitude athlete village in downtown Big Bear — where athletes and teams train, recover, test, meet, stay, compete, activate with brands and get into the mountains, inside one integrated ecosystem run by one operator.
Four buildings, four distinct jobs, four moments in the same athlete's day. Each phase makes the phases around it worth more — to the athletes who use them, to the town that hosts them, and to the brands that build them with us. This is infrastructure for sport, performance, tourism, recovery, community, events and long-term economic impact.
Every facility sits inside a working mountain town that already has the beds, the food, the transport and the trailheads. We build the buildings; the town supplies the rest.
Olympic programs, professional teams, endurance and adventure athletes and mission-support users are already asking for serious facilities on this mountain. The constraint is supply.
The run-up to 2028 is pulling international training and activation west. We are building infrastructure designed to outlast that summer by a decade.
A build underway now, a specialist headquarters next, a lakeside recovery and longevity centre after that, a flagship campus last — each stage de-risked and funded by the one before it.
02 — One Mountain Village
The facilities ring downtown Big Bear — Pine Knot, the Village, the lodging, the restaurants, the retail, the lake and the trailheads — rather than sitting off on their own campus. End to end the ecosystem is under a mile on foot. A team can land, check in, train, test, recover, eat and be on the mountain without getting back in a van.
The broad, serious, high-end floor. Olympians, pro teams and a thousand public members under one roof. This is where the ecosystem starts earning.
Adventure and tactical performance either side of a full-height climbing wall, the kitchen, and the culture floor above the door. NSA's own home.
On the water: bathhouse, diagnostics, modality floor and clinic. Where a training block turns into measurable adaptation — and where the town becomes a member.
Fields, water, full rosters, camps and live events. The campus that turns a training destination into a sporting destination.
Four distinct jobs, deliberately. The facilities cross-refer and sell together as one premium package — they never compete for the same athlete on the same day. Phase 03 is intentionally not on this map — we are evaluating lakeside sites, so it will sit on the water rather than in the village. Everything else is addressed.
Phase One · Breaking ground now
The performance basecamp. Serious enough for an Olympic program on a Tuesday morning, welcoming enough for a thousand locals on a Tuesday night. This is the build happening right now — and the one we want you inside of.
Existing conditions
Commercial building, built 1961, ~16,300 SF on a 1.44-acre lot with ~96 parking spaces. The central event space is the Phase 1 footprint; the lobby becomes the community touchpoint.
Who it serves
Program · guide, not a schedule
Creative direction
Mountain performance — not sterile laboratory.
High-end, technical and extremely functional, but unmistakably Big Bear. Timber, blackened metal, durable rubber, warm light, natural texture, subtle alpine references. Equipment should read as part of the architecture, not furniture dropped into a white room. A standard high-end gym for Olympians, pro teams and the public — with the mountain in the materials.
Avoid: the bright-white boutique-gym look. This is a serious room that happens to sit at 6,742 feet.
Design-partner brief · Phase 01
If this were your brand's flagship mountain-performance floor on the West Coast — what would you build into it?
Phase Two · Target spring 2027
Where DBB is the standard elite gym done properly, NSA HQ is the one that could only exist on a mountain — adventure and tactical performance either side of a full-height climbing wall, a licensed kitchen at the door, and a culture floor overhead. It is the clubhouse of the mountain, and it is our home.
Existing conditions
A live building with enormous open volume left over from its ice-rink past, an existing commercial kitchen and licence, and a member base already on the mountain. That volume is the asset. There is already a wall dividing the floor, and it is the tallest section of the building — which is exactly where the climbing wall goes. The first deliverable is the as-built survey; the vision is designed to fit what the building already gives us.
Program families
Creative direction
A refined mountain lab. Darker, moodier, more experimental.
Equal parts elite training HQ, expedition basecamp, athlete clubhouse and next-generation recovery center — while staying authentically Big Bear rather than imported from a city. This is the building where innovative brands are invited to push the envelope hardest.
The vertical + the clubhouse
Rotational strength, power, eccentric control, grip, balance, durability and mountain-specific preparation, alongside tactical training for institutional users. Behind it all, the reason the building is worth having: a climbing wall on the existing structural divider, in the tallest volume on the site, impossible to retrofit into anything else on this mountain. Upstairs, over the door, the culture — a social lounge, a members' commons, a bar and an event loft, looking out over the wall. This is the building people come to even on a day they are not training.
Design-partner brief · Phase 02
This is the building where we want you to push the envelope hardest.
Phase Three · Following NSA HQ
Training at altitude is only half the transaction. The other half is what the body does with it afterwards — and that needs a building of its own, on the water. The Lodge is a lakeside recovery and longevity centre with a sports science lab inside it: diagnostics, a full modality floor, a clinic, a bathhouse that opens onto the lake, and retreat programming that runs in days and weeks rather than hours. Part performance recovery, part longevity medicine, part health and wellness retreat.
Why it earns its own building
Site & reference imagery
Phase 03 is deliberately shown as program rather than plan — we are evaluating several lakeside sites, and the footprint follows the one we secure. The categories, the adjacencies and the guest sequence are settled. This is the phase where a design, equipment or clinical partner has the most influence available anywhere in the plan.
Program families
Creative direction
A lakeside retreat with a lab in it. Warm, dim, quiet, mineral.
Where DBB is a serious floor and NSA HQ is a loud vertical clubhouse, the Lodge is the volume knob turned down. Stone, cedar, steam, low light, water sound, big glass to the lake, no mirrors and no music you have to talk over. Clinical where it needs to be clinical — the lab and the clinic read as precise and medical — and everywhere else, closer to a Nordic bathhouse on a pine shoreline than to a recovery studio in a strip mall. The test is simple: it should feel like somewhere you would book three days, not forty-five minutes.
Avoid: the clinical-white wellness-tech look, and the influencer cold-plunge aesthetic. This is a place a national team and a 62-year-old local both feel was built for them.
Design-partner brief · Phase 03
This is the phase with the most room left in it. Nothing is drawn yet.
Phase Four · 2–5 year horizon
The flagship. Fields, water, full rosters, camps and live events on a single campus — the asset that turns Big Bear from a place teams visit into a place the sport comes to.
The vision
NSA is in early, informal conversations with major action-sports and event properties — including interest from X Games — about what a live-event platform at this altitude could support. Nothing is committed; this is directional, not contractual.
Creative direction
Campus architecture born from the mountain, not dropped onto it.
High-performance infrastructure, landscape and spectator experience integrated as one. More destination campus than conventional sports complex.
03 — The Athlete Journey
This is the product the ecosystem eventually sells: a team lands in Big Bear and buys the whole week, not a room by the hour. One quote, one contract, one invoice — lodging, messing, transport, permitting and production included.
The flywheel
Revenue & utilisation lanes
More athletes drive demand for equipment, recovery, lodging and food. More brand participation improves the buildings and attracts more elite users. More elite users create content, credibility and events. More events increase destination traffic and local impact. Each phase increases the value of the others.
04 — Why Partner Now
Early partners aren't buying logo placement, and we aren't buying an equipment line. This is the window where a brand can influence how an entire ecosystem gets designed, then own its category across four buildings as they open — and bring its own pipeline of teams, athletes and institutional relationships to the mountain with it.
Shape athlete flow, equipment families and the look of the rooms while they are still drawings.
Olympic, professional, adventure, tactical and public users on the same floors, at altitude, year-round.
Enter at Phase 1 and carry category presence through NSA HQ, the Longevity Lodge and the flagship campus rather than closing a one-off sale.
| Phase | What we'd love you to imagine | What would help us most |
|---|---|---|
| 01 · DBB | The flagship mountain-performance floor — zoning, equipment families, finishes, the athlete/member split. | A concept layout and equipment direction for ~5,000 SF, designed to scale into the building. |
| 02 · NSA HQ | Adventure and tactical performance either side of a full-height climbing wall, with a culture floor above the door. | Category thinking on the wall, mountain-specific strength, and how food and culture share a performance building. |
| 03 · Longevity Lodge | A lakeside recovery and longevity centre: bathhouse on the water, diagnostics lab, modality floor, clinic and retreat programming. | Recovery sequencing, diagnostic infrastructure, and what a membership built on healthspan rather than headcount looks like. |
| 04 · BBPC | The campus: fields, water, event bowl, media and sponsor activation at full scale. | Long-horizon ideas we can hold — nothing that needs committing to today. |
The immediate ask
Start with us on Phase 1. Help define the athlete experience and the build scope — then we move into commercial terms, pricing and sponsorship across the ecosystem.
This is a vision document, not a locked design, equipment schedule or sponsorship menu. Timelines are targets subject to construction and transaction timing. Areas and dimensions are indicative and require field verification. References to the LA28 era are market context only — NSA claims no official Olympic or LA28 affiliation and uses no protected marks.