That’s what the city intended when it created the South Poway Business Park, a 2,500-acre. Development that attracts mostly industrial and commercial tenants. But hidden among the  warehouses and company headquarters are a few places where you’re more likely to find kids in athletic gear than employees in business suits.

     Among them: a pistol-shooting range where Junior Olympians train, a gymnastics studio and a roller-hockey rink that caters to adult and youth teams. Most were lured to the business park by the relatively low rent, expansive buildings and proximity to Interstate 15.

     That’s what drew Tony Salmeri there when he was scouting for a place to open his gymnastics studio in 1993. He wanted an upscale area with a lot of families where the rent wouldn’t put a big dent in his bank account.

     After looking around the county, he decided on a nondescript building on Brookprinter Place, just off Stowe Drive. Six months later, he moved Poway Gymnastics across the street, to a larger building next to an industrial carpet-cleaning  business and a plumbing company.

     What the place lacks in public visibility, it makes up for in other ways, he said.

     “You can see what I mean -- high ceilings and lots of space,” Salmeri said, waving his arms at 11,000 square feet of mats, balance beams and spring floors.

     The 26-foot-high ceilings of the former warehouse give plenty of room for the four sets of parallel bars and the hanging rings. In the summertime, Salmeri opens the large roll-up metal doors -- designed for trucks to drive into the building -- to cool down the young gymnasts.

     People find out about him through word of mouth, he said.

     “Of course, it would be great to be down there on Poway Road with people driving by all the time, but I’d be paying twice as much,” he said. “And in most of those buildings, my parallel bars would hit the ceilings.”

     The size of the buildings didn’t matter much to Charlie Jackson, who runs the non-profit Black Mountain Shooting Club. He wanted to build his own, and the business park had the room to do it.

     “We built this from the ground up,” Jackson said of his indoor shooting range,   where he’s groomed young athletes to compete in Olympic   pistol-shooting  events for the past 3 ½ years.

     His 25,000-square-foot building is at a lonely end of Stowe Drive, in a section where development is still to come.

     “This area made a lot of sense. We could design the architecture, the city wasn’t a huge bureaucracy to deal with, we could own the land,” he said.

     The business park, which lines both sides of Scripps Poway Parkway, was created to strengthen the city’s tax base and provide new jobs. The first athletic-type use was when United States International University, in Scripps Ranch, asked to practice basketball in one of the buildings.

     A recently approved Wet ‘n Wild water park is under construction in the area, and officials hope to bring in a golf course developer.

     While city officials did not intend the area for recreational uses  which are allowed under the park’s specific plan but require a conditional use permit  they say it hasn’t created a problem.

     “They kind of just popped up out there,” City Manager Jim Bowersox said. “but so far they’ve been very compatible.”

     The business park also is home to the city’s 15-acre sports park, which includes three softball fields, volleyball and basketball courts and batting cages. Part of the reason for locating the privately run facility there was because there wouldn’t be any neighbors to overhear disputes with umpires.

     That also appealed to Steve Dix, co-owner of Tek-Ice Arena on Stowe Drive. He opened the hockey rink in 1994 with a synthetic ice surface, then switched to a plastic surface to cash in on the roller-hockey craze.

     The rink hosts kids and adult leagues and training sessions. When there’s no practice of games going on, the rink is open for skate and shoot, and anyone with $5 can strap on skates and play with the puck.

     He came to the business park after striking out in other cities because of zoning problems.

     “We looked all over to find a place,” said Dix, who’s also an insurance agent. “It took us a year and a half to finally find this one.”

     Since most of the activity takes place at night or on weekends, there aren’t many problems with surrounding businesses, which include an engineering firm and a moving company, he said.

     “For exposure, it’s not a great location,” he said. “But once people find us, it’s not a problem.