Sports Authority has made it official: The bankrupt retailer will close its Englewood headquarters and let 461 workers go, according to a notice filed late Wednesday with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
The headquarters at 1050 W. Hampden Ave. will shut down effective June 3 and the jobs will be eliminated on the same day. The people let go include business analysts and planners, buyers, graphic designers, marketers and merchandise managers, as well as a large number of vice-president-level executives.
“Due to unforeseen circumstances, Sports Authority must reduce its business operations and close certain operations of the Englewood Store Support Center on an accelerated schedule,” Douglas Garrett, an interim executive at the company, informed the state in a letter required under the Workers’ Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
Garrett wrote that Sports Authority wanted to notify the state sooner, but felt that disclosing any plans to close the headquarters would have hurt its efforts to raise capital and restructure.
“We initially had foreseen maintaining business operations at this location by either locating a buyer or having certain assets and stores purchased during the public auction,” he wrote.
Buyers and outside investors didn’t show the expected interest, forcing the closure.
The layoffs were not unexpected, given the company is in the process of selling or .
Sports Authority had 2,400 employees in Colorado, 772 of them at Englewood corporate headquarters, when it filed for bankruptcy protection in March, company officials said at the time. An earlier round of layoffs in January cut the local workforce by 100, mostly from the corporate offices.
and trying to find other tenants for the two large buildings at the junction of South Santa Fe Drive and Hampden, which are located across the street from CityCenter Englewood, the mixed-use redevelopment of the old Cinderella City Mall.
“This is a terrible blow to our community,” Englewood city manager Eric Keck said last month. “Whenever you lose a primary employer, it has ripple effects throughout the business community. The loss of that daytime population is going to have an impact.”
