Northlake's StarCenter Opened in March. It Didn't Finish Opening Until August.

Mayor Brian Montini stood at the ribbon on the evening of March 31 and called it a milestone for the town. He wasn't wrong. Two NHL-regulation ice sheets, a Keller-versus-Northwest high school hockey game, open gym basketball and volleyball, hockey showcases for the Victory Green Girls Hockey League, and even a Dallas Pulse volleyball player or two signing autographs on the concourse. If you'd read the headline the next morning, you'd have assumed the Children's Health StarCenter Multisport Northlake was open, full stop.

 

If you'd shown up that same week looking for a pickleball court, or a burger and a beer to watch the game afterward, you'd have found neither. The pickleball courts didn't open until August 1. The sports bar didn't pour its first beer until August 7, more than four months after the mayor cut the ribbon and roughly two months later than the facility's own press materials had originally promised. The grand opening was real. It just wasn't the whole building.

 

The 225,000-square-foot facility sits at 13850 Chadwick Parkway, just east of where I-35W meets Highway 114, close enough to the Texas Motor Speedway that you can feel the corridor's ambition even before you park. It's the Dallas Stars organization's 11th StarCenter across the Metroplex and the first one built west of I-35W, which is a real distinction for a part of southern Denton County that has grown fast without much in the way of indoor recreation to show for it. The project broke ground in April 2024 and carried a $45 million price tag, funded through general obligation bonds that Northlake voters approved. The Stars operate it under a 30-year lease.

 

What opened on March 31 was genuinely substantial: two NHL-regulation rinks, eight basketball courts that convert into 16 volleyball courts, locker rooms, concessions, and programming that started almost immediately with spring hockey, basketball, and volleyball leagues. One rink now carries Montini's name, a nod to the years he spent pushing the project toward reality. The other honors Joe Nieuwendyk, the former Dallas Stars player and general manager. One of the two gyms is named for Rhyle McKinney, a former Argyle basketball star who played all four years of varsity ball despite being born legally deaf. These aren't corporate naming rights. They're the kind of detail that only shows up when a town builds something for itself rather than around a sponsor.

 

Dallas Stars CEO Brad Alberts was there too, crediting Montini's hockey fandom for getting the idea in front of the organization in the first place. It read, and was, a genuine community moment. What it wasn't yet was a finished building.

 

Here's the part that didn't make the ribbon-cutting coverage: the same press release announcing the grand opening also said the facility's eight pickleball courts and its Shark Club Sports Bar & Grill were still to come, with the sports bar originally targeted for June. June came and went. The courts and the restaurant both slipped.

 

The rollout, once you line it up, looked like this:

 

 

Four and a half months separate the mayor's ribbon and the sports bar's front door. That's not a knock on the project. It's a useful thing to know if you're the kind of Northlake resident who checked the StarCenter website in April, saw no pickleball listed yet, and figured the amenity had been quietly dropped. It hadn't. It was just running on its own construction and lease-up timeline, separate from the municipally funded core.

 

As of this fall, the full build is finally in place. The pickleball courts are open for drop-in play alongside the basketball and volleyball open-gym sessions the facility has offered since March. Shark Club, owned by Dallas Stars owner Tom Gaglardi's Vancouver-founded chain, is the brand's second U.S. location after an outpost in Plano. It's a 5,000-square-foot restaurant with 37 televisions inside and a patio that looks directly out over the pickleball courts, which makes it a genuinely useful spot to grab a table after your own game or to watch someone else's. Hours run 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Thursday, later on Friday and Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Sunday.

 

Put together, that's a facility where a Northlake family can skate, play open-gym basketball, book a pickleball court, and eat dinner without leaving the parking lot. That combination didn't exist in southern Denton County before this year. It does now, but only since early August.

 

The StarCenter isn't standing alone. It anchors a 60-acre mixed-use development called Chadwick Farms, planned to eventually include up to 900 apartments, a hotel with a conference center, and roughly 60,000 square feet of additional retail and restaurant space along the Highway 114 corridor. The Cambria Hotel and Northlake Conference Center, the town's first full-service hotel and conference venue, has already opened nearby to serve exactly this kind of growth.

 

That layering explains the timeline better than any press release did. The ice rinks and gym were the bond-funded, municipally owned piece, built to a fixed public schedule and ready to open the moment construction and inspections cleared. The pickleball courts and Shark Club were privately leased tenant build-outs, each running on its own permitting and construction calendar once the shell was handed over. A ribbon-cutting announcement can bundle all of that into one triumphant evening. The actual keys don't turn on the same day.

 

It's worth remembering the next time a development near you announces a big opening date. The headline event and the last piece of tenant build-out are rarely the same moment, even when the same press release covers both.

 

What sticks with you walking through the StarCenter now isn't the square footage. It's that a rink carries the mayor's name, a gym carries a local athlete's name, and the whole thing still somehow reads like a hometown project rather than a franchise stamped onto a highway interchange. Northlake has been adding this kind of infrastructure in stages all year, the ice first, the recreation second, the gathering spot last, and each piece has made the last one more worth the drive.

 

If you're already living in Northlake, you don't need us to tell you the town is changing fast. You've watched Harvest, Pecan Square, and The Ridge fill in around you, and you've probably driven past the Chadwick Farms signage a dozen times without knowing what it would eventually hold. If you're weighing a move into this stretch of the Alliance corridor and want someone who tracks these rollouts as closely as we just did, the team at Berry Boyd Group would be glad to walk you through what's here now and what's still filling in. Book an appointment when you're ready to talk specifics.