Academy Sports + Outdoors Is Opening Eleven New Stores—Because Apparently the Internet Hasn’t Killed Everything Yet

Every few months, someone announces the death of physical retail.

The internet killed the department store. Amazon killed the shopping mall. Inflation killed discretionary spending. Smartphones killed our attention spans. Streaming killed our desire to leave the house. Self-checkout killed human interaction. And somewhere, at this very moment, a management consultant is putting the phrase “retail apocalypse” into a PowerPoint presentation while charging somebody $600 an hour.

Then Academy Sports + Outdoors walks into the room carrying a tent, a fishing pole, three pairs of running shoes, a propane tank, and plans for eleven new stores.

The company announced that it has opened two new locations and expects to open nine more during its fiscal third quarter. The eleven stores will be spread across six states: Texas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Georgia, Virginia, and Tennessee. Together, they are expected to create more than 650 jobs.

That does not sound like an apocalypse to me.

It sounds more like a company looking at the supposedly ruined American consumer and saying, “Yes, people are financially stressed, but somebody still needs baseball cleats by Saturday morning.”

And honestly, Academy may have a point.

Eleven Stores, Six States, and a Whole Lot of Parking Spaces

Academy has already opened new stores in St. Clairsville, Ohio, and Kerrville, Texas. During the remainder of the quarter, it plans to open locations in Celina, Lacy Lakeview, Granbury, and Fairview, Texas; McAlester, Oklahoma; Fayetteville and Statesboro, Georgia; Roanoke, Virginia; and Millington, Tennessee.

Anyone looking at that list can see the strategy without needing a graduate degree in corporate geography. Academy is not planting giant stores in Manhattan, San Francisco, or downtown Boston and hoping somebody wanders in for a kayak after brunch.

It is concentrating on communities where youth sports, hunting, fishing, grilling, camping, school athletics, and suburban family life are not lifestyle accessories. They are part of the weekly routine.

That distinction matters.

A fishing rod is easy to order online if you know exactly what you want. It is less convenient when you do not know the difference between six nearly identical reels and would prefer to ask someone before spending $150. The same is true for running shoes, baseball gloves, golf equipment, coolers, exercise gear, tents, and outdoor cooking equipment.

People like convenience, but they also like touching things before buying them. They want to try on the shoes, swing the bat, sit in the folding chair, compare the coolers, and stare thoughtfully at a wall of fishing lures as if the correct color will finally settle an ancient dispute between humanity and bass.

That is what a physical store can offer.

It also offers the sacred retail experience of going inside for one item and leaving with seven.

I have done it. Most of us have.

You walk in because your child needs soccer socks. Forty-five minutes later, you are standing in the checkout line with soccer socks, a water bottle, two shirts, a bag of beef jerky, a folding chair, and a flashlight powerful enough to signal passing aircraft.

You do not remember picking up the flashlight.

The flashlight chose you.

The Expansion Is Not a Random Burst of Corporate Enthusiasm

Academy says it has opened seven stores so far in 2026 and expects to open between 20 and 25 during the full fiscal year. The company opened 24 stores across 16 states in 2025, following 16 openings in 2024. Altogether, it has opened more than 60 locations since 2022. Academy’s August 2026 expansion announcement makes clear that this is a sustained growth program, not an executive waking up one morning and deciding the nation suffers from an unacceptable shortage of charcoal grills.

That consistency is important.

Opening stores is easy to celebrate in a press release. Making them productive is the harder part. Every new location comes with rent, construction expenses, fixtures, payroll, inventory, utilities, insurance, distribution costs, and enough fluorescent lighting to make every customer question their complexion.

A store is not a success merely because a ribbon was cut in front of it.

It must attract customers, move inventory, generate repeat business, and eventually produce a reasonable return on the capital invested. If it cannot do that, it becomes a very large and expensive building filled with unsold pickleball equipment.

Academy has at least provided evidence that its newer stores can contribute. In fiscal 2025, the company reported that new stores were producing comparable-sales growth in the high single digits during the third quarter. That does not guarantee the 2026 class will perform equally well, but it gives investors something more substantial than management enthusiasm.

And management enthusiasm, while abundant, cannot be deposited in a bank.

Why Physical Stores Still Make Sense for Academy

I understand why people remain suspicious of brick-and-mortar expansion. We have all watched retailers open stores aggressively, call it “scaling,” and then close half of them three years later while pretending the retreat was an “optimization initiative.”

Corporate vocabulary is amazing that way.

When executives open stores, they are expanding access.

When they close stores, they are improving efficiency.

When sales collapse, the consumer is cautious.

When prices rise, the company is delivering greater value.

Somewhere in corporate America, there is an executive vice president whose entire job is preventing the word “failure” from appearing in a quarterly report.

Academy’s model, however, has characteristics that make physical stores useful rather than ceremonial.

First, sporting goods frequently involve fit, feel, and immediate need. A family realizing on Friday evening that its child needs new cleats for a Saturday tournament does not want to study a delivery estimate. It wants the cleats now.

Second, the company sells products that are awkward or expensive to ship. Grills, weight benches, patio furniture, kayaks, oversized coolers, and other bulky merchandise do not always fit neatly into the frictionless fantasy of online retail.

Third, Academy offers in-store services including bike and grill assembly, scope mounting, bore sighting, fishing-line spooling, propane exchange, and the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. Nobody has yet figured out how to spool fishing line through a browser, although I am sure a technology company will eventually raise $80 million promising to disrupt it.

Fourth, stores can support digital sales. Customers may browse online, pick up in the store, return products locally, or use same-day delivery. The relationship between e-commerce and physical retail is no longer the tidy little war people once imagined. The store can function as a showroom, warehouse, service center, pickup location, return desk, and place where a customer asks an employee why every shoe now appears to be made of brightly colored marshmallow foam.

Academy’s e-commerce sales rose 22.2% in the third quarter of fiscal 2025. That matters because the company is not opening stores as a substitute for digital growth. Ideally, it is using each channel to support the other.

That is the fashionable theory, anyway. Execution will determine whether it becomes reality or another phrase on an investor-day slide.

Let’s Talk About the Actual Financial Picture

The expansion sounds impressive, but I am not going to toss confetti merely because a retailer found eleven available buildings.

The financial backdrop is mixed.

For fiscal 2025, Academy generated approximately $6.05 billion in net sales, an increase of 2% from the previous year. That is growth, but nobody needs to alert the Guinness World Records committee.

Comparable sales declined 1.5% for the year. In plain English, much of the company’s total growth came from adding stores rather than convincing established locations and e-commerce operations to sell substantially more.

That is not automatically bad. Expansion is supposed to add revenue. But I pay close attention when total sales rise while comparable sales fall because it raises a basic question: Is the core business genuinely strengthening, or is management adding square footage fast enough to disguise softness underneath?

Fiscal 2025 net income fell 9.9% to approximately $376.8 million. Diluted earnings per share declined 3.3% to $5.54. Gross margin improved, but selling, general, and administrative expenses rose faster than revenue. Academy’s fiscal 2025 results showed a company making progress in some areas while still wrestling with a pressured consumer and the cost of growth.

That is a more honest picture than either extreme.

Academy is not a collapsing retailer frantically opening stores to create the appearance of momentum. It is also not an unstoppable growth machine printing money every time it installs a gun counter and stacks YETI coolers near the entrance.

It is a profitable retailer pursuing expansion while its existing-store performance remains less exciting than management would prefer.

Welcome to investing, where the truth is usually less dramatic than the headline.

The Consumer Is Still the Main Character

Academy’s management has acknowledged that American consumers remain under financial pressure.

That pressure is especially relevant because sporting goods live in the complicated territory between necessity and discretionary spending.

A child who joins a school team may genuinely need shoes, clothing, protective gear, or equipment. A hunter may replace essential gear. A runner may need another pair of shoes. These purchases have practical urgency.

But the premium cooler, second kayak, upgraded grill, decorative outdoor furniture, and additional fishing rod are easier to postpone when groceries, insurance, housing, utilities, and credit-card payments keep consuming more of the household budget.

Consumers do not always stop spending during difficult economic periods. They become selective. They wait for promotions. They trade down. They buy one item instead of three. They choose a private-label product over a national brand. They keep wearing the old shoes for another month while insisting the sole is “still basically attached.”

That behavior can work in Academy’s favor because the chain emphasizes value. It carries major brands including Nike, Adidas, Carhartt, YETI, Stanley, Brooks, Titleist, and Blackstone, but it also sells private-label merchandise through brands such as Magellan Outdoors, BCG, Freely, H2OX, Redfield, and Mosaic.

Private labels give Academy more control over pricing and margins. They can also provide a more affordable alternative for shoppers who want functional gear without paying extra for a logo large enough to be seen from orbit.

The challenge is balance. Customers like value, but they also walk into sporting-goods stores looking for brands they already trust. Academy must offer enough recognizable merchandise to generate traffic while using its exclusive products to protect margins and distinguish itself from competitors.

That is not revolutionary retail science. It is simply difficult to do consistently.

New Stores Create Growth, but They Also Create New Ways to Be Wrong

I like Academy’s expansion logic. I also know that every expansion story contains a hidden danger: management can start believing its own applause.

Successful retail concepts often look invincible immediately before they open too many locations.

A company identifies a format that works. It expands carefully. The new stores perform well. Investors reward the growth. Executives become confident. Confidence becomes a target. The target becomes a promise. The promise becomes twenty locations in places where the company would never have opened five years earlier.

Eventually, somebody is explaining on an earnings call that several markets “did not mature according to the anticipated timeline.”

This is why I care about store economics more than store counts.

I want to know how much Academy spends to open each location, how quickly stores reach profitability, what sales they generate per square foot, how their margins compare with mature stores, and whether new locations steal sales from nearby existing ones.

I also want to watch inventory.

At the end of fiscal 2025, Academy reported merchandise inventory of about $1.50 billion, up 14.9% from the previous year. Inventory per store was up 6.3% in dollar terms, although units were flat. Some of that increase may reflect product costs, merchandising decisions, preparations for new stores, tariffs, or strategic inventory purchases.

Still, inventory is where retailers store both their optimism and their future clearance racks.

If demand meets expectations, inventory becomes revenue.

If demand disappoints, inventory becomes a brightly colored sign announcing 40% off.

Academy needs enough merchandise to stock new stores and meet demand without creating a mountain of products that must later be discounted. That sounds obvious, but retail history is a long parade of executives discovering that obvious things are difficult.

The Community Donations Are Good—And Also Good Business

Academy says the eleven store openings will include $65,000 in donations supporting more than 200 children through local nonprofit organizations.

At the St. Clairsville opening, hometown football player CJ Goodwin helped surprise 20 children from the local school athletics department with a $5,000 shopping spree. In Kerrville, Academy provided a similar shopping experience for children connected with Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Texas and made additional donations to the Kerrville Public School Foundation and Kerr Together.

I think that is genuinely positive.

Children receiving equipment, clothing, and access to sports is a good outcome. Local nonprofit groups receiving financial support is a good outcome. A company entering a community and immediately demonstrating some interest in the people who live there is better than arriving with a giant sign and acting as though the community should simply be grateful for another parking lot.

It is also marketing.

Both things can be true.

Corporate charity does not become meaningless merely because it generates favorable publicity. If the community benefits and the company builds goodwill, I am comfortable with the arrangement. We do not need to pretend Academy’s executives gathered in a candlelit room and decided to abandon capitalism.

The company wants customers.

Supporting youth sports and local organizations is one way to introduce the brand, develop relationships, and show that the store intends to participate in community life. That is particularly sensible for a sporting-goods retailer whose future revenue depends partly on children joining teams, families spending time outdoors, and communities maintaining active recreational cultures.

The donations are compassionate, strategic, and useful.

Life occasionally permits more than one motive.

More Than 650 Jobs Deserve More Than a Footnote

The eleven stores are expected to create more than 650 jobs.

Retail jobs are often discussed in strangely dismissive terms, as if the people working them are temporary background characters in somebody else’s economic story. But 650 jobs mean paychecks, schedules, training, promotions, and opportunities for people who may need flexible work or an entry point into management.

Are these all spectacularly paid careers with private offices and expense accounts? Obviously not.

But communities do not function solely through software engineers, surgeons, and people who describe themselves online as serial entrepreneurs. They also need cashiers, stockers, sales associates, department leads, store managers, maintenance workers, and logistics employees.

The quality of those jobs matters. Pay matters. Benefits matter. Scheduling matters. Advancement matters. A press release can tell me how many positions a company expects to create, but it cannot tell me whether the employees filling them will feel respected six months later.

That is the human side of expansion investors can overlook.

Wall Street sees 20 to 25 new stores.

A worker sees next month’s rent.

A parent sees a schedule that may or may not fit around childcare.

A teenager sees a first job.

A department manager sees the possibility of running a store one day.

Growth is not merely a row in a spreadsheet. It changes the lives of the people expected to produce it.

Academy’s Real Advantage May Be Knowing What It Is

One thing I appreciate about Academy is that the company does not appear desperate to reinvent itself as a luxury lifestyle ecosystem powered by artificial intelligence.

It sells sporting goods and outdoor equipment.

That is refreshingly understandable.

The company’s stores are practical, broad, and designed around value. They are places where families can buy cleats, camping gear, workout clothing, fishing supplies, coolers, shoes, grills, hunting equipment, patio furniture, and a bewildering number of insulated beverage containers.

The business does not need to become mysterious.

It needs good merchandise, competitive prices, useful locations, knowledgeable employees, efficient distribution, disciplined inventory management, and a digital operation that does not behave as though it was built during a three-day emergency.

Retailers sometimes become distracted by the need to sound innovative. They announce partnerships, platforms, personalization engines, data ecosystems, and transformative customer journeys.

Meanwhile, the shopper just wants to know whether the store has size-ten shoes.

Academy has been investing in same-day delivery, its rewards program, a branded credit card, and retail media. Those tools may improve customer retention, advertising revenue, and transaction frequency. But none of them changes the basic equation.

If the store has the right product at a fair price when the customer needs it, Academy has a chance.

If it does not, no amount of corporate vocabulary will save the sale.

What I Like About the Strategy

I like that Academy is expanding into markets that fit its identity.

I like that the company is opening stores across several states rather than staking everything on one region.

I like that newer stores have shown promising sales performance.

I like the combination of physical retail, e-commerce, same-day delivery, services, national brands, and private labels.

I like that the company remains profitable and expects total sales growth of 2% to 5% in fiscal 2026.

I also like that Academy is returning capital to shareholders. The company increased its quarterly dividend by approximately 15% to $0.15 per share and ended fiscal 2025 with roughly $437 million remaining under its share-repurchase authorization.

Those shareholder returns are not enormous, but they show that management believes the company can fund expansion while still distributing capital.

Most importantly, I like that Academy’s business serves activities people actually enjoy.

Sports, fishing, camping, hiking, grilling, hunting, exercise, and outdoor recreation are not fleeting inventions created by an algorithm. They are durable parts of American life. Participation levels will change. Product trends will change. Consumer budgets will tighten and loosen. But people are unlikely to wake up one morning and collectively decide that nobody needs shoes, baseballs, tents, coolers, or grills anymore.

That gives Academy a sturdy demand foundation.

What Makes Me Cautious

My enthusiasm stops well short of blind faith.

Comparable sales have been weak. Fiscal 2025 profitability declined. Consumers remain pressured. Inventory needs careful monitoring. New stores require capital, and their early success must persist after the grand-opening giveaways disappear and the giant inflatable decorations come down.

Competition is another concern.

Academy competes with Dick’s Sporting Goods, Walmart, Bass Pro Shops, online retailers, specialty stores, direct-to-consumer brands, local dealers, and marketplaces offering nearly infinite selection. Consumers can compare prices in seconds while standing in Academy’s aisle.

The company cannot simply open a store and assume geography will protect it.

It must earn traffic through assortment, service, convenience, and price. It must make the shopping experience useful enough that customers return after the novelty wears off.

I am also cautious about the temptation to confuse expansion-driven sales with organic strength. If Academy opens dozens of stores while comparable sales remain negative, the company could become larger without becoming meaningfully better.

Size is not the same thing as quality.

A larger boat with a small leak is still a boat with a leak.

My Bottom Line

Academy Sports + Outdoors opening eleven stores across six states is a meaningful vote of confidence in its business model and in the continuing relevance of physical retail.

The announcement tells me management sees room to grow. It tells me Academy believes its value-oriented sporting-goods format can travel beyond its historical base. It tells me the company is willing to invest while other retailers remain cautious.

But the announcement does not settle the argument.

The stores must perform.

They must attract customers after the ribbon cuttings. They must manage inventory without depending on endless promotions. They must contribute profits, not merely revenue. They must complement the company’s digital business. And they must prove Academy can expand without weakening the economics that made expansion attractive in the first place.

For now, I see a retailer doing something surprisingly old-fashioned: opening stores because it believes people still want to shop in them.

Maybe that should not feel rebellious.

But in an era when every company wants to become an app, a platform, a subscription, or an artificial-intelligence assistant, there is something almost charming about Academy planting another building beside a highway and filling it with shoes, bats, tents, grills, and enough outdoor equipment to let suburban shoppers briefly imagine they are preparing for an expedition across the Yukon.

The strategy is not glamorous.

It is not futuristic.

It does not require a keynote presentation featuring a man in a black turtleneck.

It simply depends on whether families continue playing sports, going outdoors, cooking in their backyards, and discovering at 8:17 on Friday evening that somebody forgot to buy shin guards.

I would not bet against that.

Academy’s eleven new stores are not proof that physical retail has conquered the internet. They are proof that the most successful retailers may be the ones that stop treating online and in-store shopping as mortal enemies.

Customers do not care about channel strategy.

They care about getting what they need, at a price they can afford, without turning the experience into an endurance event.

If Academy can deliver that consistently, the company’s expansion could produce durable growth.

If it cannot, those eleven ribbon cuttings will eventually become eleven very expensive lessons in commercial real estate.

That is the wager.

And unlike the flashlight I somehow purchased during my last sporting-goods run, at least this one is worth examining before taking it home.