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Athletic infusion

Cities and counties compete to host an array of sporting events, which keep tourism dollars flowing.

By LOUIS HAU
Published July 11, 2005

During the past year, Hillsborough County has enjoyed an enviable winning streak in landing major professional and collegiate sports events.

The 2012 NCAA Division I men's ice hockey championships, or "Frozen Four," will be held at the St. Pete Times Forum in Tampa. So will the 2009 Southeastern Conference's SEC men's basketball tournament. And, of course, there's the Super Bowl, which will be back at Raymond James Stadium in 2009.

Against this glittering backdrop of prestigious events, does anyone really care that the Amateur Athletic Union's Sunshine Shootout Basketball Tournament was in Tampa over the weekend? Or that the National Junior Disability Championships are coming this Saturday? Or that Plant City will play host in October to the International Softball Federation's annual Co-Ed Slow-Pitch World Cup?

You had better believe it, says Rob Higgins, executive director of the Tampa Bay Sports Commission.

"Big-ticket events could not be more important to us," Higgins says. "But there are about 40,000 employees in the tourism business (in Hillsborough County), and consistency is important to these people. It's those youth and amateur events that can generate a large return on everyone's investment."

It's a refrain growing louder and louder in economic development circles around the country.

Reliable dollar figures are hard to come by, but total room nights booked at lodging establishments - a common measure used by the convention and tourism industry - helps illustrate the dramatic growth in such events as a tool to draw visitors.

The Tampa Bay Sports Commission, which brings events to Hillsborough County, says its room night total in the fist eight months of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 was 60,837, nearly triple last year's total of 21,770.

The St. Petersburg/Clearwater Sports Commission projects that amateur and youth sports events will have filled about 57,800 room nights in Pinellas County in the current fiscal year. That would be up 19 percent from the previous year and up 89 percent from the year before that.

While sports events marketing still accounts for a relatively small portion of total tourism spending in Pinellas, it is an important source of growth, according to St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention & Visitors Bureau executive director Carole Ketterhagen.

The Pinellas commission plans to add a second sales manager in its next fiscal year, Ketterhagen says, because "we know there's considerably more business to attract."

Industry observers say two broad trends have played into the emergence of amateur and youth sports events as a tool for economic development. One is an increase in the number of these events. The other is expanding competition among cities and counties to host them.

The traditional pillars of youth sports in America had long been school teams, Little League baseball, Pop Warner football and local recreational leagues for soccer, softball, swimming and other sports. At the more advanced levels, the Amateur Athletic Union's sports programs used to serve as a de facto training ground for Olympic athletes.

But this landscape has changed since passage of the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, which established the U.S. Olympic Committee and led to the formation of new national governing bodies for individual sports.

Several years earlier, Title IX legislation passed, which barred gender discrimination by educational institutions receiving federal money. As a result, women's collegiate sports had begun growing rapidly, which in turn fueled greater female sports participation at high school levels and below.

With a heightened awareness of the benefits of physical fitness and declining budgets at many schools for team sports and physical education classes, participation in organized youth leagues flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, contributing to a proliferation of sports organizations holding their own tournaments.

Meanwhile, aging baby boomers, many of whom spent a sizable chunk of their child-rearing years shuttling kids to sports events, have remained active themselves. This has helped feed the growing market for amateur events aimed at middle-aged participants and retirees.

In the early '90s, increasing numbers of convention and visitors bureaus noticed the boom in participatory sports, as well as the fact that the athletes often were accompanied by family and friends who might spend money. The focus sharpened after Sept. 11, when convention and business travel declined.

Hosting a sports event used to mean vying for a big professional or collegiate event, with the candidates restricted to the 30 or 40 largest cities in the country, says Don Schumacher, executive director of the National Association of Sports Commissions in Cincinnati.

Now, sports events marketing is often about attracting amateur and youth events, and the pool of would-be host cities is much bigger, he says.

Fifteen municipal sports commissions founded the national association in 1992. The group now has nearly 400 members, including more convention and visitors bureaus than sports commissions.

Schumacher says the rush to snare a piece of the action has caused some cities to exaggerate the potential economic benefits, and some event owners to exploit those expectations by seeking higher bid fees.

"We raise a big red flag every time someone starts mentioning economic impact," Schumacher says. "The temptation is to overstate the value of an event. It's community boosterism, "Look at us.' "

Still, he stresses "there just isn't any debate" that a properly run amateur or youth sports event will bring money to a city so long as costs are kept in check and the event doesn't drive other visitors away.

Lisa Delpy-Neirotti, an associate professor of tourism and sport management at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., cautions that some public officials new to sports events marketing underestimate the amount of work required to host an event. She notes that host duties can include a myriad of tasks, such as lining up corporate sponsors, making hotel and restaurant arrangements, and providing volunteer man power.

"You can't just jump into this," she says.

Many Florida communities, with tourism markets of various sizes, have climbed aboard the bandwagon, helped by an off-season that coincides with the peak tourist season of other markets, as well as with the summer vacations of student athletes.

The state's biggest player in amateur sports events, and one of the largest in the nation, is Walt Disney Corp.'s sprawling, 220-acre Wide World of Sports Complex, which opened in Lake Buena Vista in 1997 to capitalize on this trend.

While Wide World of Sports hosts the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' preseason training camp and Atlanta Braves spring training games, the majority of its events are amateur and youth competitions. Many are held by the Amateur Athletic Union, whose headquarters are on site.

At the other end of the spectrum is Central Florida's Polk County Sports Marketing, an arm of the Polk County division of tourism and sports marketing. It may not be Disney, but it maintains a full calendar of amateur events, including the National Softball Association's girls' fast-pitch state championships, the annual Strawberry Invitational swimming tournament held by the City of Lakeland Aquatics swimming club, and a woodbat baseball championship series organized by former Atlanta Braves third baseman Terry Pendleton.

And that was just this past weekend.

More than 4,000 athletes of all ages participated in those and other events throughout the county, says Mark Jackson, the county's director of tourism and sports marketing.

During the past decade, sports events have helped turn the typically slow month of July into one of Polk County's busiest periods for tourism, he says.

Hosting sports events has become a core component of the county's relatively modest tourism industry, which counts Cypress Gardens Adventure Park in Winter Haven as its biggest attraction and has long relied on its proximity to Orlando and the Tampa Bay area for a large chunk of its local hotel business.

"We don't have the inventory (of tourist destinations) that you guys have over there with the beaches and the major sporting venues or the major attractions in Orlando," Jackson says.

Hillsborough and Pinellas counties have the advantage of being home to professional sports franchises. But local officials still see plenty of room to expand their share of sports-related visitors.

Clearwater has been the host of the International Baseball Championship World Series for the past five years, thanks to a multiyear deal negotiated by the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Sports Commission. The commission also helped bring to Largo the Amateur Athletic Union's National Diving Championships, which take place later this month.

The St. Petersburg/Clearwater commission parts ways with many of its counterparts in other areas by maintaining a policy of not vying for events that require a bid or sanctioning fee. Such fees can range from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the size of the event.

The commission does make other concessions, such as defraying the rental costs for a venue in exchange for advertising at the event, a link on the sponsoring organization's Web site or other services.

"When you get into things like bid fees, you're paying for the event before they even get here," Smith says.

The Tampa Bay Sports Commission considers bid fees "on a case-by-case basis" and will sometimes pay them, executive director Higgins says.

One deal that didn't include a bid fee was a four-year contract the Tampa commission reached in April with United Soccer Leagues to host its annual SoccerFest, which includes its annual general meeting as well as its Super Y-League North American finals.

The commission will offset venue costs and provide USL with marketing support and volunteers, Higgins says.

Tampa's efforts to draw sports events benefit from its record of having previously concluded deals to host the Super Bowl and other marquee events, Higgins says.

"While they're both significantly important for our area," he says, "we'll be able to do more amateur sports business just because of there being ample opportunity."

Louis Hau can be reached at 813 226-3404 or hau@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 9, 2005, 00:21:40]