Here’s a look at the planned Sports Illustrated resort in Tuscaloosa

Tuscaloosa city officials have gotten a first look at a proposed Sports Illustrated resort.

Last week, the city’s Riverfront Advisory Committee heard the proposal from representatives of Sports Illustrated, Travel+Leisure, Lamar Johnson Collaborative and TTL, Inc.

The resort, announced last year, will be part of a new network of sports-themed resort and lifestyle complexes in popular college towns near universities with devoted fan bases.

For Tuscaloosa, developers plan a nine-story, 137-room hotel with 150 condos and 250 timeshare units at 105 Rice Mine Rd. N., on the Black Warrior River.

Campus resorts will feature a full-service hotel, a vacation club, and residential condominiums, designed to immerses guests and owners in memorable moments drawn from almost seven decades of Sports Illustrated content. Resorts will feature live action sports and entertainment, quality dining, wellness, and relaxation, the companies said last year.

The first Sports Illustrated Resorts property opened in 2022 in Cap Cana in the Dominican Republic.

The Tuscaloosa project would be built in two phases, with construction beginning early next year and ending by the beginning of 2027.

The first phase would include the hotel, a restaurant, one timeshare and one condo building, along with three retail buildings and a central services building. The second phase would include four timeshare and condo buildings.

Design would be stylistically in keeping with the look around campus, with windows incorporating the view. The front facade features staggered balconies to give the illusion of motion to the building, said Elias Vavaroutsos, principal with Lamar Johnson Collaborative, which is heading the design.

Austin Bolton, who oversees university and community partnerships with Sports Illustrated Resorts, said there’s a natural connection between the venerable sports magazine and the university – Alabama has appeared more times than any other school on the magazine’s cover, he said.