JADDE Sports owners Don and DaNae Rappleye (center) with store staff members Paul Felshaw (left) and Jessica Stuart (right) finish preparations as the new store opened on Friday morning. Photo by Vernon Robison.

By Vernon Robison

Moapa Valley Progress

A Mesquite store that has long been a mainstay for many local back-to-school shoppers moved its quarters last week. JADDE Sports opened its new location in the Bowler Plaza on N. Sandhill Blvd. on Friday, July 22.

The store will be closing its old location, which was on W. Pioneer across from Walmart, at the end of July, said store owner Don Rappleye.

“We are going to keep the old store open until the end of the month and we’ll have a big 50% off sale on everything there,” Rappleye said.

Rappleye and his staff put in long hours last week to get the new location up and running without having to close the store’s operation for even one day.

“We stayed open through the whole thing,” Rappleye said. “We couldn’t really afford to be closed so we were pretty much up all night Thursday putting the new store together.”

The new JADDE Sports location is less than half the size of the old store. But this change was just a way of adapting to a different economic environment, Rappleye said.

“In the current market, we just can’t order as much as we used to and keep such a large inventory,” Rappleye said. “Instead we are really focusing in on the stuff that has traditionally been our high demand items. We will keep a good selection in those product lines and still provide the great service we always have.”

Shoes are one of the product lines that JADDE Sports has been known for. Rappleye said the store will continue to stock shoes as it always has. This includes work boots, casual shoes, and, of course, running shoes.

Rappleye is a marathon runner himself and has an expertise in providing shoes to runners. One of his top selling shoes has been the Five Finger running shoe. “This is really the best shoe for runners out there,” he said pointing to the pair he is wearing on his feet. The shoe looks like a glove for the foot, each toe having its own compartment. “They provide by far the best support for runners of any shoe out there,” he said.

The store will also continue to sell popular lines of casual clothing and sports wear. These include brand names like Fox and Volcom as well as high performance sports lines like UnderArmor.

The store will also continue to be a headquarters for bicycle hobbyists and athletes. It carries the best brands in street bikes, mountain bikes and BMX. It also carries a healthy inventory of bike parts and some accessories. Staff member Paul Felshaw is the store’s resident bicycling expert providing full-service and tune-ups for bikes right at the store.

JADDE Sports has been open for 17 years in Mesquite. Rappleye opened the store in 1994 a couple of years after moving to the Mesquite community from northern Utah.

“We had just finished at BYU and my wife was from this area,” he said. “My mother-in-law really wanted us down here. But I wasn’t very excited about living in the desert. I wasn’t sure I’d like it. But we came and I loved it. Being a marathon runner I don’t think there is any better place to run than in the desert.”

Rappleye opened an Overton branch of the store back in 1998. It stayed in operation for two years. “We tried it there and it went okay,” he said. “But it just didn’t do enough back then to keep it open.”

“But I loved the people there,” he added. “They were great customers and a lot of those families are still regulars at the shop here.”

Last year a JADDE Sports location opened in Las Vegas in the Town Square Shopping Center on South Las Vegas Blvd. just north of I-215. It began as a small sales kiosk, Rappley said, but business quickly picked up and he decided to open a store. “We have done really well there thus far,” Rappleye said. “Those five finger shoes have just flown off the shelf there.”

Despite the difficult business environment, Rappleye plans to be serving Mesquite and the Moapa Valley communities for a long time to come. “The tough climate just means that I have to operate as smart as I can and adjust the right ways to keep up with what’s going on out there,” he said. “There will always be ups and downs. This is the worst I’ve ever seen it. But it is not going to kill us.”