Crack!

The sound of a baseball bat connecting with a ball rips across the vast room, as players from Niagara County Community College's team practiced their swings Thursday morning amid a sea of netting.

But this isn't your ordinary setting for batting cages.

This is the inside of the former Sears store at Summit Park Mall – part of the new Niagara International Sports & Entertainment Center.

And it's just the beginning of what owner Zoran Cocov envisions as a $2.2 billion reuse project to bring new life to an aged but empty retail complex, while drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors to Western New York.

That is, if he can pull it off, without a strong track record of accomplishment, on a site that has confounded previous attempts at redevelopment. The mall has been mostly vacant for years, a prior attempt to buy and release it fell through, and the adjacent property that Cocov owns was previously targeted for a $600 million theme park that was abandoned when financing collapsed.