Club Fusion to open facility in Batavia

In working for Club Fusion Volleyball during the past nine years, Mike Bui has been asked the same question again and again.

“Most people ask us, ‘Where is Marengo?’ ” Bui said.

Marengo is about a 45-minute drive northwest from St. Charles East, where Bui works as an assistant girls volleyball coach, and it’s also the home of Club Fusion Volleyball.

During club volleyball season, practices at Club Fusion – one of the premier volleyball clubs in the state – requires athletes from the Tri-Cities area to make the substantial trek multiple times each week.

Bui, owner Wayne King and the rest of Club Fusion’s staff realize that the drive to Marengo is a lot to ask of the program’s high school athletes.

They also figured that starting a youth program in Marengo, where the same time commitments would be needed from both athletes and their parents, is an unrealistic goal.

But with the opening of a new volleyball facility at Route 31 and Fabyan Parkway in Batavia in July, Club Fusion is strengthening its foothold with local athletes.

“Sometimes it’s a tough ride out to get out to Marengo,” Bui said. “It’s a 45-minute drive. To move the program closer to home, it helps some of the athletes who couldn’t drive that far. [They] have another option – to drive 10 minutes instead of 45.

“The other thing was to help grow our youth program, too. Volleyball starts at the youth program and when we can’t get the kids to drive 45 minutes, it’s hard to really teach the sport. It’s kind of nice to move it there so we can train them at the youth level.”

Bui will be a program director at Fusion’s facility in Batavia. He will run many of the training programs and youth programs, especially in the fall season.

The East assistant coach also will be in charge of the program’s summer camps, the first of which Bui and King plan on beginning in late July.

Fusion’s Marengo facility will remain open and, in Bui’s words, “is where we’re going to focus on our elite athletes.”

The Tri-Cities facility primarily will serve as a home for athletes ranging from first to eighth grade, allowing Fusion to teach the fundamentals of a game in which athletes typically begin playing at an advanced age when compared to soccer and basketball.

“We certainly want to continue our high level of training and we can influence the younger athletes at an earlier age before they mature into elite athletes that have been in our program,” King said. “We think this will definitely give them a head start on it. Growing youth volleyball is the goal for most clubs; try to grow the number of athletes and try to reach out toward more of the younger athletes and try to grow volleyball at the grass roots.”

Although Fusion has yet to begin the old Dreyer Medical building’s transformation into a three-court volleyball facility and has kept news of the new facility relatively quiet, there already has been a positive response among several of the program’s parents.

“We’ve got a lot of interest from a lot of parents from the area,” Bui said. “They say, ‘It’s kind of great to have a youth-level program here where you can just drive down the street.’

“Hopefully we’ll get a big draw for youth kids. A lot of parents don’t want to drive 45 minutes to get there and we completely understand. So by moving to the Tri-Cities, we’re dead in the middle of St. Charles, Batavia and Geneva.”

For more information about Fusion’s facility in Batavia, visit south.fusionsportscenter.com.