"We're excited to bring a sport that means so much to our community, indoors."
That's the Mapes family, the group behind the new D-BAT franchise headed for Williston Square, explaining why they picked this city for their newest location. It's a simple line, but it points at something Williston families already know from experience: real practice time between October and March is hard to come by here, and it has been for as long as anyone can remember coaching a Little League team through a Bakken winter.
What's easy to miss in the excitement over a new business announcement is that Williston hasn't been sitting still on this problem. The city already runs its own off-season training. What D-BAT actually adds is more specific, and more useful to know, than the headline suggests.
What's Actually Going Into Williston Square
The city's economic development office announced the project in a press release dated August 10, 2026, confirming D-BAT will occupy a new 27,000-square-foot building. D-BAT itself was founded in 1998 in North Dallas, Texas, and now operates more than 170 locations around the country. The name stands for Developing Beliefs, Attitudes, and Traditions, and the Williston location will be owned locally by franchise owner Brooke Mapes, along with co-franchisers Alan Mapes, Tailor Quilling and Huntor Mapes.
Here's how the square footage breaks down, based on the city's announcement:
| Space | Size | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Training and retail floor | 18,000 sq ft | Pro shop, batting cages (some with pitching machines, some set up for live hitting and instruction), pitching lane cages, multiple simulators |
| Leasable space | 6,000 sq ft | Available for a retail or restaurant tenant, not yet announced |
That leasable 6,000 square feet is worth watching on its own. Nobody has announced a tenant yet, but it means whatever moves in next to D-BAT becomes its own small story for the neighborhood.
The Mapes family has said they hope to break ground this summer, with details on groundbreaking, opening date, and specific instructional programs still to come. If you're the parent of a nine-year-old outfielder, that timeline probably matters more than the square footage does. More on that below.
The Program Williston Already Had
Before D-BAT existed as an announcement, Williston Parks and Recreation District was already running organized baseball and softball for kids in the city, and it still is. The district's youth programs page describes non-travel leagues built around T-Ball, a Cal Ripken League, Little League, and a dedicated Youth Softball League. The district also lists something called simply Off Season Baseball and Softball Training, a program that already exists to keep kids swinging bats between seasons.
Older players have somewhere to go too. Williston High School fields both baseball and softball, competing as the Coyotes in the Western Dakota Athletic Conference alongside the rest of the district's varsity sports.
So this isn't a city with no winter baseball infrastructure waiting for a private company to show up and save the day. It's a city that has already built a community-run system around the same problem D-BAT is now stepping into.
What Actually Changes
Here's the distinction that matters if you have a kid who plays, or you coach one. Parks and Recreation's off-season training is exactly what the name suggests: a community program, run through the district, built for participation across a wide range of skill levels, organized around a season and a sign-up window.
D-BAT is a different kind of thing entirely. Based on how the franchise describes its standard model across its other 170-plus locations, cages are rented in half-hour increments, the cages use real baseballs and softballs, and instruction comes from staff the company describes as living and breathing the game rather than from parent volunteers. It's also open on a walk-in basis, not tied to league registration, which means a family could show up on a Tuesday in January without waiting for spring sign-ups, though Williston's specific hours and pricing haven't been published yet.
Anna Nelson, the city's Economic Development Director, framed the addition this way in the announcement: "As our city grows, so does the demand for recreation, indoor activity, retail, and food and beverage options, and D-BAT fills those needs all under one roof." That's the real shift. It's not replacing what Parks and Rec already does. It's adding a second, more specialized layer on top of it, the kind of layer that lets a serious travel-ball kid keep working on mechanics in January instead of waiting for the thaw, while the community league keeps doing what it's always done for the kid who just wants to play.
More Than A Cage
The Mapes family has also been clear that D-BAT isn't positioning itself purely as an athletic facility. In comments reported alongside the city's announcement, they said the goal was to build a space where the community can come together, whether that's for training, birthday parties, date nights, or just an evening out with friends. That tracks with how D-BAT operates elsewhere, where pro shops, party packages, and simulator bays share the same building as serious instruction.
Nelson tied the project to something bigger than sports, too. She's on record saying that recreation isn't just a pastime, that it contributes to the health, education, and quality of life that supports residents and strengthens the city's ability to attract talent and grow its business community. It's the kind of line you'd expect from an economic development office, and it's also just true in a place where winter shapes so much of daily life. A facility like this gives families another reason to be out of the house on a February evening instead of another reason to stay in.
What We Don't Know Yet
To be straightforward about it, a lot of the practical details aren't public yet. The city's release says groundbreaking, opening date, and instructional programming will be announced later, and nothing published so far includes membership pricing, cage rental rates, or a firm opening season. Anyone planning around this for a specific team or a specific kid's training schedule should keep an eye on D-BAT's own site for updates rather than assuming a timeline.
What is confirmed is the location: Williston Square, the mixed-use development going up on the site of the former Sloulin Field airport. It's already become one of the more closely watched patches of ground in the city, and this is one more piece of it filling in.
Why This Is Worth Tracking
Williston has never lacked for baseball and softball culture. What it has lacked, based on how often winter comes up in every quote connected to this project, is a dedicated place to keep working on the game once the fields freeze. Parks and Recreation built one kind of answer to that years ago. D-BAT is building another, aimed at a different need, right alongside it.
If you're raising a ballplayer in this city, or coaching one, or you just like watching the Coyotes play in the spring, this is a genuinely useful thing to have on your radar, independent of anything to do with real estate. That's exactly the kind of local development that's easy to miss in a press release and easy to appreciate once it's actually open.
If you're watching Williston for bigger reasons, whether that's a growing family looking for the right neighborhood or an investor tracking what a project like Williston Square signals about the city's direction, that's a conversation Carla Kemp has every week. Reach out any time you want a local read on where this city is headed next.
