Sports Business Journal 2020 Power Players

Pendulum CEO Jonathan O’Neil Cole Announced As A Sports Business Journal 2020 Power Player: Design and Development

Sports Business Journal named Jonathan O’Neil Cole a Power Player in Design and Development, in a list assembled mostly from peer nominations. The editors asked the industry two questions to build it: which competitor do you respect the most, and which vendor do you want at the table from the beginning.

The entry traces the career plainly. Cole started at HNTB on the Oakland Coliseum and Oracle Arena renovations, moved through other major firms, and founded Pendulum in 2007 as one of the few minority owned architecture practices in the United States with a sports portfolio. The listing credits the firm’s niche in minor league ballparks and spring training complexes, naming the Atlanta Braves’ CoolToday Park in North Port, Florida and the renovation of the Marlins and Cardinals joint facility in Jupiter.

What put Pendulum on Major League Baseball’s radar, by Cole’s own account in the piece, was an unsolicited concept: a downtown ballpark and mixed use district for the Kansas City Royals that nobody had asked the firm to draw. The site took roughly 48,000 hits in the first fifty hours after the release. He knew the Royals were not going to call, he said, and added that the firm could no longer be ignored. That concept is on this site as the Downtown Kansas City Ballpark.

SBJ launched the Power Players series in April 2016 and had not revisited design and development until this issue, prompted by a record $8.9 billion in facility openings that year.

Source: “Power Players: Pendulum Studio”, Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal, November 16, 2020.

The framework Pendulum uses to judge a venue as a long term civic and financial system is set out in S.C.O.R.E.