Drive down Chadwick Parkway on a random Tuesday afternoon and you might expect the parking lot outside the Children's Health StarCenter Multisport to be half empty, the way a new local rec center usually is on a weekday. Instead you'll likely find it packed with out-of-town license plates, hockey bags stacked by the curb, and a line of families waiting for ice time that has nothing to do with anyone who lives within five miles.
That's not a fluke. It's the building working exactly as designed. And once you understand who this facility was actually built for, the rest of what's opening around it on Chadwick Parkway, and what's opening a few minutes away on FM 407, starts to make a lot more sense.
What Voters Actually Paid For
The Children's Health StarCenter Multisport Northlake opened on March 31, 2026, on a 225,000-square-foot footprint at 13850 Chadwick Pkwy. It's the 11th StarCenter in the Dallas-Fort Worth area but the first west of I-35W in southern Denton County, which is part of why it matters here specifically. Inside are two NHL-regulation ice rinks, eight basketball courts that convert into 16 volleyball courts, and eight pickleball courts. The Dallas Stars operate the whole complex under a 30-year lease with the town, which broke ground back in 2024 and paid for it through a voter-approved general obligation bond, not existing property tax revenue.
That funding detail matters more than it sounds like it should. A bond that residents approved reads as a resident amenity. But bonds get repaid, and the way this one gets repaid is by the building generating enough activity, and enough surrounding commercial development, to justify itself. That's a different design goal than a city building a splash pad for the neighborhood down the street.
The Number That Explains the Parking Lot
According to Southlake Style's reporting on the grand opening, the complex is projected to draw an estimated 1.3 million visitors a year. Spread evenly across the calendar, that works out to roughly 3,500 visits a day. Traffic like this never spreads evenly, though. A weekday pickleball open play session might see a few dozen people pay their ten dollars and go home by lunch. A hockey or volleyball tournament weekend can pull in teams and families from three or four counties, filling every rink and court and every parking space along Chadwick Parkway from Friday evening through Sunday afternoon.
That gap between the quiet Tuesday and the packed Saturday is the whole story of this building. It was sized for the Saturday.
Same Bar, Two Different Nights
The clearest proof of that sits right inside the front doors. Shark Club Sports Bar and Grill opened at the StarCenter on August 7, 2026, with a ribbon-cutting hosted by the Metroport Chamber of Commerce. It's only the brand's second U.S. location, following its first in Plano, and it also runs the Shark Shack, the facility's concession stand and coffee bar.
The posted hours tell you who each shift is built for:
| Day | Hours |
|---|---|
| Monday–Thursday | 11 a.m.–11 p.m. |
| Friday | 11 a.m.–12 a.m. |
| Saturday | 10 a.m.–12 a.m. |
| Sunday | 10 a.m.–11 p.m. |
| Happy hour | Mon–Fri, 3–7 p.m. and 10 p.m. to close |
Weekday happy hour, twice a day, is a schedule built around people who work nearby or dropped their kid at hockey academy and want a beer before picking them up. That's the local window. The extended Friday and Saturday closing times, by contrast, line up with tournament schedules, where games run late into the evening and out-of-town teams are still looking for somewhere to eat at 10 p.m. on a Saturday. If you're a Northlake resident who wants a quiet table and a game on the TV without competing with a bracket full of traveling teams, the weekday happy hour blocks are your actual opening, not the weekend.
The Building Next Door Confirms It
If the bar's hours are the first clue, the development rising beside the StarCenter is the second. The facility sits inside Chadwick Farms, a 60-acre mixed-use project planned for up to 900 apartments, a hotel of more than 150 rooms with its own conference center, and 60,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space along Highway 114.
That's not neighborhood-scaled retail. That's infrastructure built to catch people who are already driving in for a tournament and give them somewhere to stay overnight.
The Cambria Hotel and Northlake Conference Center, the town's first full-service hotel, already opened nearby to serve exactly that traffic. None of this is a knock on the project. A facility that pulls 1.3 million visitors a year is a genuine economic engine for the town, and residents get to use the rinks, courts, and bar too. It's just worth knowing that when you're deciding whether to walk in on a Saturday.
Where the Actually Local Corridor Is Growing
While Chadwick Parkway fills up with visitor-facing development, a different kind of growth is happening a few minutes away on FM 407, and it looks nothing like Chadwick Farms.
Harvest's Northlake Commons is a square built around retail, restaurants, services, and the town's own municipal offices, which is about as clear a signal of "built for residents" as commercial development gets. Two more projects are under construction along the same corridor: Northlake Crossing at Gibbs and Robson Ranch Roads, tied to The Ridge, and Pecan Plaza at Gibbs Road and FM 407, tied to Pecan Square. Both are scaled to the residential communities they sit inside, not to a regional tournament calendar.
The most concrete example of what that corridor is attracting is a new restaurant. As of early August 2026, the Hashtag India restaurant chain filed plans to build at the corner of FM 407 and Cleveland-Gibbs Road, its eighth location in Texas, with the nearest existing locations in Irving, Aubrey, and McKinney. That's a national chain choosing a spot inside a residential corridor rather than the tourism corridor, which tells you something about which side of town it expects its regular weeknight customers to come from.
How to Actually Use What You Paid For
None of this means the StarCenter isn't yours to enjoy. It means using it well requires reading its calendar the way you'd read any facility built for two different audiences at once.
- Book pickleball open play or public skating on a weekday afternoon, not a weekend, if you want short lines and open courts.
- Hit Shark Club during the Monday through Friday happy hour windows if you want a table without tournament overflow.
- Check the facility's league and tournament calendar before a weekend visit. Youth hockey, volleyball, and basketball leagues run seasonal schedules that can fill the building fast.
- For a regular weeknight dinner out, look toward the FM 407 corridor, Northlake Commons, Northlake Crossing, and the Hashtag India location once it opens, rather than Chadwick Parkway.
Northlake is adding two different kinds of commercial gravity at the same time, one aimed at people driving in from out of town and one aimed at the people already living here. Knowing which is which is the difference between fighting a tournament crowd for a parking spot and actually enjoying what your town just built.
If you're already watching how Northlake's growth is reshaping which pockets of town feel more residential and which feel more regional, that's exactly the kind of read Minouche Martins tracks street by street across the north-DFW corridor. Reach out to request a personalized consultation if you want a clearer picture of where a move in or around Northlake actually fits.
