Scroll through the Omaha area's local forums this summer and you'll find Millard parents doing math with a street grid. Someone posts that the new activity center is going up "just west of 204th and Q," another parent from Green Meadows, up near 137th and Blondo, jokes that Gretna is closer to the new building than they are. A third resident points out that kids in north Elkhorn will have a shorter drive than families in eastern Millard. Nobody is wrong. The building carries Millard's name on the door, but it's sitting on some of the last available land the district actually owns, and that land happens to sit right where Millard, Elkhorn, Gretna and Douglas County West all bump into each other.
That's the real story behind the GreenState Millard Activity Center, and it's worth understanding before the ribbon gets cut this fall. Not because it changes whether the facility is a good addition to the neighborhood. It clearly is. But because it tells you something true about Millard itself: a district that's been fully built out for decades has almost nowhere left to put something this size except its own edges.
What's Actually Going Up
The GreenState Millard Activity Center is an 85,000-square-foot, $20 million facility being built entirely with private donations, no tax dollars involved. It sits on 40 acres next to Keith Lutz Horizon High School, a site the Millard Public Schools Foundation already owned. Inside, families will find six full-size hardwood courts for basketball and volleyball, a sports performance training gym, an indoor synthetic turf area for year-round practice, and a custom Innovation Lab built for robotics, coding and invention projects. There's also an esports lounge going in with 16 gaming stations, funded through a dedicated fundraising push by the foundation. Outside, the 40 acres include an adventure course and a cross-country trail loop.
The project is being designed by Alley Poyner Macchietto Architecture and BCDM Architects, with Sampson Construction as general contractor. GreenState Credit Union holds the naming rights, and Omaha-based Prime Secured signed on earlier this year for court-naming sponsorship. The foundation brought in Rachel Blum as activity center director and Mike Mackie, co-owner of the youth basketball training facility The Factory, as programming and operations manager. Millard Public Schools Foundation CEO Carlos Castillo has called it one of the largest community-focused projects in the foundation's history.
Why It Landed Where It Did
Here's the part that surprised some longtime residents. When the foundation first announced the project in the summer of 2025, a Millard parent living near 137th and Blondo, on the district's northeast edge, asked why the center wasn't closer to the middle of Millard. Another neighbor, Joe Ashley, raised a similar point to a local news crew, noting that residents of north Elkhorn would end up closer to the new facility than residents in the eastern parts of Millard itself.
Castillo's answer, in that same conversation, was straightforward:
"There are not many properties available in the Millard area that can accommodate a facility this large."
That's not spin. Millard was its own incorporated city for more than a century before Omaha annexed it in 1971, which means its street grid and land parcels were laid out long before anyone was planning 40-acre community campuses. Most of the buildable land inside Millard's boundaries has been developed for decades. The site the foundation landed on works because the district already owned it, sitting on the western fringe where Millard's boundary lines run up against Elkhorn, Gretna and Douglas County West. One longtime local forum poster summed up the local map with a color key: green for Millard, blue for Elkhorn, purple for Gretna, pink for DC West, all converging within a few blocks of 204th and Q.
None of that makes the location a mistake. It just means the building's address tells you less about who it's for than its name suggests.
What Families Actually Get to Use
Beyond the courts and the turf, the foundation has built out programming aimed at younger kids specifically. The Spark before-and-after-school program already runs in all 25 Millard elementary schools and serves more than 2,000 students a year in STEM and recreational activities. A newer offering called SparkUP is designed for incoming fifth and sixth graders, built around a lounge space nicknamed "The Nest," along with technology challenges and off-site field trips.
For adults and community groups, the practical news is that the foundation is already taking reservations. As of July 2026, the foundation confirmed it's accepting inquiries for tournaments, practices, meetings, community events and facility rentals beginning in January 2027. If you coach a rec league, run a community group, or just want to reserve court time for a birthday party down the road, that's the window to start asking.
When the Doors Actually Open
The opening date has sharpened as construction has moved along. Early announcements in 2025 pointed to a general "fall 2026" completion. By February 2026, Prime Secured's sponsorship announcement narrowed that to "late fall 2026," noting a hard hat tour had already taken place for project partners in May. The most recent update, from July 2026, marks one full year of construction progress and confirms the foundation has made its first leadership hires while construction remains on schedule. Nothing in that timeline has slipped. It's just gotten more precise, which is usually a good sign for a project this size.
What This Means If You Live Somewhere Else in Millard
If your house sits toward the western edge of Millard near 204th, this new center is genuinely convenient. If you're up in Green Meadows near 137th and Blondo, or down in Old Millard near Millard Avenue and Q, you're looking at a longer drive than someone living in newer Elkhorn subdivisions just a few blocks from the site. That's not a knock on the project. It's a reflection of how little raw land Millard has left to work with, and it's a detail worth knowing if you're weighing which activities are a quick trip versus a planned outing.
It's also a small reminder of something true about Millard generally: the neighborhood's boundaries were drawn a long time ago, back when this was farmland split between a handful of property owners, not the patchwork of subdivisions it is today. The activity center didn't create that patchwork. It just happened to build its front door right where the seams show.
For families weighing courts and STEM labs against a longer drive, or just trying to figure out which side of Millard puts them closest to the next big thing, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground detail worth knowing before the ribbon gets cut. If you're curious how a specific pocket of Millard stacks up, whether that's proximity to new amenities like this one or the everyday rhythms covered in our look at Millard's parks and trails, we're happy to walk through it neighborhood by neighborhood.
Have questions about a specific pocket of Millard, whether it's this corner near 204th and Q or somewhere closer to Old Town? The Lynch Ladies know these streets because we live on them too. Schedule Your Free Consultation and let's talk about what's actually happening in your part of the neighborhood.
