Steve Burton is about to build the ultimate sports playground and family entertainment center in Chesterfield County. The campus will cater to athletes of all ages and abilities in more than 20 Olympic sports. Professional franchises in several sports will fall under the SportsQuest umbrella and compete on campus.

Dreams and opportunities are Steve Burton’s bread and butter. The SportsQuest CEO’s professional life began when he was a graduate student studying sleep patterns in the 1980s. The Chester native created a diagnostic monitoring system to help make his life easier. “I basically didn’t have a life,“ Burton said. “Out of a need to get one, I wrote a computer program to automate the scoring of the research data I was doing. It did in about 30 minutes what I took four to six hours to do.“

Can you imagine a place where you can get in a daily 45-minute workout with Olympic-caliber athletes, then go watch an Indoor Football League game or a minor league hockey game, all for the same price? Steve Burton can. And that’s why SportsQuest’s CEO is confident that Richmond-area residents will embrace his 250-acre, $250 million campus in Chesterfield County.

The vision for SportsQuest is utopian. The financial reality of building a project of its scale is a complicated mix of private money, debt, speculation and doubt. The idea for SportsQuest is impressive. So is the price tag. It’s a $250-million, 250-acre sports facility that will include athletic fields, an ice-skating rink, an entertainment center, training amenities, an athletic center, and a velodrome, as well as retail and office space. It will support youth, Olympic and professional sports.

Kimberly Derrick and Jordan Malone qualified for the 2010 U.S. Olympic Short Track Speed Skating team after competing in the four-day trials in Marquette, Mich., last weekend. Derrick was a 2006 Olympian. Throughout the event, Derrick and Malone consistently finished on the podium and each won one event. Derrick won the gold medal in the women’s 1,000 meters, and Malone won gold in the men’s 444 meters. Derrick and Malone each ended the trials ranked third overall. The top five men and women earned a spot on the team.

SportsQuest announced yesterday that its Indoor Football League team will be named the Richmond Revolution. Fans chose the name of the team through a balloting process. One fan will be selected from the ballots submitted to win a lifetime season ticket to Revolution games. The Revolution will begin play on April 3, 2010 at the Arthur Ashe Center.

In the suddenly crowded indoor football market, the Indoor Football League has a simple message—buy local. The league, which will launch a Richmond team April 3, 2010, touted its Richmond credentials yesterday at a press conference announcing the team will play its inaugural season at the Arthur Ashe Center. That will be the team’s temporary home until the team’s owners move it into the SportsQuest facility in Chesterfield, under construction for the 2011 season.

Break out your earplugs. Indoor stock car racing is coming to Chesterfield County. SportsQuest, a planned $175 million multisport megafacility at Powhite Parkway and State Route 288, yesterday announced that Arena Racing USA will join a growing list of sports programming the campus will offer. The indoor, half-scale stock car racing series for up-and-coming drivers, is backed by an investor group that includes former Washington Redskins coach Joe Gibbs of Joe Gibbs Racing, Tom and Norm Miller of Interstate Batteries, and Gary Becker, formerly of PACE Entertainment.

For anyone who thinks one indoor football team in town is not enough, the Indoor Football League has good news. The IFL plans to have a franchise playing in Richmond by 2011. There is a strong possibility of having the team ready to play in April 2010. The IFL is not to be confused with the American Indoor Football Association, which announced in April it plans to have a franchise in Richmond for the 2010 season. Those games are planned for the Coliseum.

The Indoor Football League plans to have a team in Richmond for the 2011 season, and possibly as early as 2010. SportsQuest has signed a letter of intent to own the team and have it play in Chesterfield County.

Chesterfield County’s SportsQuest, which caters to professional and amateur athletes in Olympic sports, expressed to Minor League Baseball an interest in possibly providing a site for a baseball stadium. SportsQuest also may have interest in becoming part of an ownership group for Richmond’s new baseball franchise. Dr. Steve Burton, SportsQuest’s chief executive officer and chairman, said yesterday there have been discussions “at the highest level with the office” of Minor League Baseball. Burton said the primary purpose of those discussions was to ask Minor League Baseball how SportsQuest could “engage Minor League Baseball programming within our campus.“

The scope of SportsQuest, a sports and entertainment complex in Chesterfield County, is expanding with the addition of 200 acres for sports tournaments. Dr. Steve Burton, chief executive officer and chairman of SportsQuest LLC, said the park “will serve as the platform for invitational tournaments that will be supported by a number of Olympic and amateur sports, including lacrosse, rugby, volleyball, soccer, field hockey and football.“

A former NBA Development League leader yesterday was named president of SportsQuest LLC, the Chesterfield County company developing a 35-acre, $100 million sports and family entertainment center at Powhite Parkway and state Route 288. And among his goals are to bring professional hockey and basketball to Chesterfield as soon as 2011. Philip G. Evans, who served as president of the NBA’s minor-league program from 2002 to 2007, said yesterday he hopes to bring a Washington Wizards farm team to the arena planned at the SportsQuest facility, as well as hockey team from the ECHL, a AA league affiliated with the NHL. Both teams would play in a 6,000-seat arena planned for the site.

Construction on a $100 million, 50-acre Olympic training facility in the Waterford Business Center in Chesterfield County could begin in February.