Dick's Sporting Goods Coming to West Des Moines

Dick’s Sporting Goods is eyeing a store in West Des Moines, its fifth under that banner in Iowa, along the busy Jordan Creek Parkway commercial corridor.

The 5,500-square-foot store, which would be located north of the Lowe’s Home Improvement store, could be open in time for the 2013 Christmas shopping season, the Des Moines Register reported.

Dick’s Sporting Goods already has stores in Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, Dubuque and Davenport. The Pennsylvania-based company, which is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DKS, also operates Golf Galaxy stores, including an Iowa location at 4520 University Ave. in West Des Moines.

According to the company’s website, Dick's Sporting Goods, Inc. is a full-line sporting goods retailer offering a broad assortment of brand name sporting goods equipment, apparel and footwear in a specialty store environment.

It was founded in 1948 when 18-year-old Dick Stack was working at an Army surplus store in Binghamton, NY. An avid fisherman, Stack was approached by the store owner to come up with a list of products needed to get into the fishing tackle business.

After Stack presented his suggestions, the owner reportedly told him he was a "dumb kid" and had no idea what he was doing. He was upset and promptly quit, according to the website, and eventually founded his own company, which now operates more than 500 stores in 44 states.

The store will be built on land owned by developer Richard Hurd, who told the newspaper that he is wooing a group of “fairly exciting national names” for a 70,000-square-foot building nearby.