20-04-2025
Blackbeard's was nearly torn down. Now, plans include a soccer stadium for Fresno
Juan Gerardo Ruelas Jr. had been on a real estate hunt for the better part of three years when he stumbled on the perfect location for his family's next project.
He'd seen hundreds of potential sites throughout the central San Joaquin Valley at that point. Dozens were almost (but not quite) viable. None of the proposed deals happened, including one that would have had them take over Selland Arena and Valdez Hall in downtown Fresno.
In the end, it was a nearly 50-year-old amusement park in central Fresno that did the trick.
'The main thing is that it was properly zoned,' says Ruelas, whose family purchased Blackbeard's Family Entertainment Center from Glad Entertainment Inc. in October with the intent of razing the property and building Fresno a long-awaited soccer-specific stadium.
The deal mostly went under the radar.
'Nobody realized,' says Ruelas, who also managing partner of Fresno Fuego FC.
'In fact, people still don't know.'
That's because things haven't changed much at Blackbeard's since the Ruelas family took over.
A row of pinball games got swapped out for newer, trendier claw machines, but otherwise the 10-acre amusement park — with its three 18-hole miniature golf courses, indoor arcade, batting cages, go karts and bumper boats —operates much as it has for years.
And they don't intend to change that anytime soon, though the original thought was to tear down the park and put up a new development to accompany the soccer stadium.
'It was pretty apparent within a couple of days: There's a lot of people who come here and really enjoy it,' Ruelas says.
Blackbeard's opened in 1977 on 15 acres on the Chestnut Avenue diagonal just south of Ashlan Avenue near the Fresno airport. It was a $2 million project that happened in two phases. The first included the installation of two miniature golf courses, a main arcade building crafted to resemble a pirate ship, and a sit-down snack bar. It opened with more than 100 arcade games.
'Pinball wizards and electronic game aficionados will think they've died and gone to heaven,' The Fresno Bee wrote at the time.
Over the next two years the park added another golf course (this one Western themed), batting cages (something new for Fresno at the time) and a six-lane water slide, which longtime Fresnans will remember as being rough on the backside.
The park earned an early reputation for serving up 'clean cut' family friendly entertainment.
According to a Bee story in 1979: 'Blackbeard's exists for the family, for dating duos and kids who would rather play miniature golf or swat a baseball than drag Belmont Avenue or drink beer in the park.'
Though the park got sold to new owners in 1984, it outlasted the newcomer competition developing up north. Camelot Park, which eventually became Boomer's, opened on Blackstone Avenue north of Herndon in 1997. The facility was closed (and then demolished) in 2017.
'All this time, Blackbeard's has thrived on family entertainment,' Ruelas says.
It never had a bar and never tried to appeal to an older crowd. That fits with the demographic that has come to support the Fuego soccer club over the past three years.
'The Fuego was family entertainment,' he says.
'We want to protect that.'
Ruelas does have some changes in mind for the park — removing the defunct water slides for a new electric go kart track, for example — but there are no official plans.
Inside Blackbeard's the back offices are still decorated in pirate paraphernalia: trinket swords, pistols and treasure chests. There's an original blueprint of the park, which Ruelas spreads across his desk, to show the property's full 15 acres. There's an empty spot in a corner of the map that was never developed. For awhile, the park operated paintball fields out there, but mostly the large dirt field houses a collection of old shipping containers.
'It perfectly fits the soccer stadium,' Ruelas says.
Current plans call for 4,000 seats with the ability to expand out to 15,000 if needed, Ruelas says. It will be soccer specific, but also multi-purpose with the intent to bring other entertainment offerings in the the area. 'It's going to look like a dope stadium.'
Having a soccer-specific stadium, or rather not having such a facility, has been top of mind in Fresno's soccer community for nearly a decade.
It was the given reason for the relocation of Fresno FC soccer club in 2019. The team played two seasons at Chukchansi Park as a United Soccer League expansion team, with the caveat that it would quickly find a suitable home for a soccer-specific stadium.
When that didn't happen, the club left Fresno for Monterey.
When the Ruelas family brought back the Fuego team in 2020, it picked up the where Fresno FC left off — trying to find a suitable spot of a stadium. The city and Mayor Jerry Dyer pushed to have a stadium downtown, offering up several locations, including an area that included Selland Arena. There was also thoughts of taking the stadium into Madera, where the Ruelas family owned 45 acres of then-undeveloped land near Valley Children's Hospital.
During the search, the team inked a deal that allowed them to play with at the soccer/lacrosse field east of Bulldog Stadium. That lasted until November, when the USL announced a mutual parting of ways with the team following a year of turmoil that included a and league investigation and suspension of head coach Jermaine Jones.
For now, the Fuego doesn't have a men's professional team as part of its organizational restructuring. It will be competing in the amateur League For Clubs (The League FC) in the 2025 season.
'That doesn't stop us from doing our original goal,' Ruelas says, 'which is to build the infrastructure.'
So, the stadium will not only be home to the Fuego — both its men's program and the just announced Fuego Femenil women's team — it will be open to other teams and programs througout the Valley. The Fuego already has a deal to share field space with Selma FC, Ruelas says.
'We know what it's like to be on the other end of the spoon.'
While there is no official timeline on the stadium project, Ruelas is looking at an opening in time for the 2026 World Cup, which is being hosted jointly by the United States, Mexico and Canada.
