USA TODAY Sports Weekly: lighting the FUSE in Gastonia

Joe Mock's in-depth review of CaroMont Health Park ran in USA TODAY Sports Weekly from June 23 to 29, 2021, a month after the ballpark opened. His conclusion was about money as much as architecture: "Architect Cole has broken the code for creating 5,000-seat ballparks for half the budget of other such facilities."

CaroMont Health Park opened in May 2021 to a capacity crowd, with Earvin "Magic" Johnson on hand. It seats 5,000, it was built for $28.8 million, and it is home to Gastonia’s Atlantic League club, the Honey Hunters at the time of the article and the Ghost Peppers since the 2025 rebrand.

What FUSE is

FUSE is the Franklin Urban Sports and Entertainment District, a 16 acre sector of downtown Gastonia the city designated for mixed-use redevelopment. The ballpark went where a vacant Sears building had sat empty for 30 years. The plan was never a stadium on its own: the city held the surrounding parcels for private development of housing, restaurants and retail, and the ballpark had to be shaped so those parcels stayed worth building on.

That is why the seating bowl is held tight to a 9.4 acre footprint. "I like to push the envelope in getting people close to home plate," Jonathan Cole told BaseballParks.com in the companion review. "It is really important to me. That is where the intimacy is." Asked about Jimmy John's Field in Utica, Michigan, his earlier independent-league park, Cole said: "What I did there, I perfected here."

Owner Brandon Bellamy put it in the same piece: "The city had the good sense to bring on Pendulum to design it. Jonathan created a masterpiece here. It is very intelligently designed."

The facts

Team: Gastonia Ghost Peppers, formerly the Honey Hunters, Atlantic League of Professional Baseball. Location: 800 West Franklin Boulevard, Gastonia, North Carolina 28052. Architect: Pendulum. Cost to build: $28.8 million. Capacity: 5,000. Opened: May 2021.

Source: Joe Mock, USA TODAY Sports Weekly, June 23 to 29, 2021, and his companion in-depth review on BaseballParks.com, an affiliate of USA TODAY Sports Digital Properties.

See the CaroMont Health Park project page, the FUSE district Phase 2 master plan, and the S.C.O.R.E. approach behind both.