Southland Reportedly Favored : Fitness Panel to Vote on Academy Location

With a formal vote planned for today, trustees of the National Fitness Foundation are leaning toward selection of a Southern California site for a proposed, $50-million athletic training academy --the first of its kind in the nation, foundation chairman George Allen said Tuesday.

The privately sponsored, nonprofit fitness academy would serve as a national training headquarters for coaches and athletes and a sports research center for high school through Olympic levels.

The Southern California locations being considered include two in a greenbelt near Laguna Niguel, between El Toro Road and Crown Valley Parkway, an area near the site of the Olympic Pentathlon at Coto de Caza and a spot overlooking the ocean in Malibu, near Pepperdine University. Locations in Houston and Indianapolis and two in Dallas--one a training facili ty for the Dallas Cowboys football team--are also in the running, Allen said.

“This (Southern California) is a desirable area, and there are a lot of pluses for having the academy here,” Allen said. “But we also have some advantages in some other spots.”

Four members of the foundation’s board of trustees met at the Hotel Meridien in Newport Beach on Tuesday and decided they “feel favorably” toward a Southern California location, Allen said after the closed-door meeting. “They are leaning that way,” he said.

The trustees toured the potential sites in Aliso Viejo Tuesday afternoon, said Costa Mesa developer Bill Harris, who headed the foundation’s building committee. They first toured Aliso Viejo last year.

“Some of the members expressed an interest in seeing the Aliso sites again, so we accommodated them,” he said. The trustees did not visit Coto de Caza because “they had seen that one more recently and didn’t need to see it again,” Harris said.

Four other members of the foundation’s board were not present Tuesday. They were to be polled by telephone today in the site-selection vote, Allen said.

One of those absent from the Tuesday meeting, Boston surgeon Tenley Albright, said in a telephone interview that “Indianapolis looked like the preferred site originally, but then there were other considerations.”

“The more we got into this, it seemed, the more space we were looking for,” Albright said. “And some of the sites just didn’t have enough space.”

Asked whether she would be prepared to vote by phone, Albright said, “I don’t know. I would not have been able to vote (Tuesday) even if I had been there.”

Head of Site Committee

Harris headed the committee to make a recommendation to the board of trustees. Harris, who is president of Rampart General Corp. of Newport Beach, said those trustees who had not attended Tuesday’s session would be rushed packets of information to assist them in deciding on their vote today.

Allen is a presidential nominee to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sport, as well as honorary chairman of the National Fitness Foundation. It was the President’s Council that sought out founders to organize the nonprofit foundation and raise the money to build the fitness academy.

The academy, first proposed after the Summer Olympics, would be the first of its kind in the United States. Although its purpose is to train coaches and athletes, Albright said she also sees it as a facility for training volunteers in health-related fitness work.

“I see it as a place that can help start other places by serving as a central model for others to copy,” she said.

In Newport Beach, Allen echoed Albright’s sentiment, saying, “It’s a concept that should have been done 40 years ago.”

Allen, a former coach of the Los Angeles Rams, Washington Redskins, Chicago Blitz and Arizona Wranglers professional football teams, said he has promised President Reagan that a site will be selected in time for the President to dedicate the facility during his administration.