The Ark will officially open with a public ribbon-cutting on Saturday. The celebration begins at 3 p.m., will feature food trucks and sports contests, and concludes with a worship night at 8 p.m.The new sports facility, a 95,000-square-foot building at 1627 St. Clare Way in Greenwood, will emphasize basketball, volleyball, baseball, and player development. It will feature seven basketball courts, four baseball tunnels and a 6,000-square-foot weight room.The venture is led by owner and CEO Jonny Marlin, a former Indiana Wesleyan...
The Ark will officially open with a public ribbon-cutting on Saturday. The celebration begins at 3 p.m., will feature food trucks and sports contests, and concludes with a worship night at 8 p.m.
The new sports facility, a 95,000-square-foot building at 1627 St. Clare Way in Greenwood, will emphasize basketball, volleyball, baseball, and player development. It will feature seven basketball courts, four baseball tunnels and a 6,000-square-foot weight room.
The venture is led by owner and CEO Jonny Marlin, a former Indiana Wesleyan University basketball player who established the Greenwood-based Marlin Academy athletic training program in 2017.
“We want it to be a high-quality place where people can play basketball and volleyball, where people can gather, where we don’t have to drive an hour, hour-and-a-half to play games,” Marlin, a former basketball coach for Greenwood Christian Academy and 2011 Center Grove graduate, told the Daily Journal at the groundbreaking on Oct. 31, 2025.
Marlin Academy’s programs will roll into The Ark, which will offer training for multiple sports and host teams, leagues and tournaments, as well as space for community events. The Marlin Academy name will live on through the AAU teams based at The Ark.
The Ark’s basketball space will be able to accommodate up to 12 volleyball courts, allowing it to host mid-sized local and regional youth tournaments for both sports as well as offering recreational leagues, camps and clinics.
For baseball and softball players, The Ark will offer pitching and hitting development and batting and pitching cage rentals.
“A lot of the purpose and drive was for the impact that we hope and pray is going to happen here on the south side” from this project, Marlin told the Indianapolis Business Journal. “At the same time, we felt like we were at a place size-wise that we were hitting some limitations. … We just felt like this was the right time, and we had enough rallying behind us by a few people to make it happen.”
The Ark name is derived from the biblical story of Noah’s Ark. It joins Greenwood Sports Park — which opened in 2024 — as part of Johnson County’s push to generate more youth sports tourism.
Greenwood Mayor Mark Myers told the IBJ the city contributed $500,000 to the Ark project through its State Road 135 and southwest area tax-increment-financing district.
Compass Construction, an Indianapolis-based construction firm, was the general contractor for the project. CSO Architects was the design firm, and Bargersville-based Duke Commercial has served as the owner’s representative.
(Information from the Indianapolis Business Journal was used in this report)