Pinellas continues ramping up national and international interest in the sports sector. More teams and tournaments are finding the appeal of the county as a hot spot for competition, driven by warmer winter weather and expanding infrastructure like the $26.5 million Sprowls Horizon Sports Park, which debuted in February.
Of course, the appeal of being somewhere warm, when your hometown is insufferable to play in during the winter, isn’t new.
Way back in the day, the New York Yankees, during Babe Ruth’s record-setting era, would practice at Huggins-Stengle Field in Crescent Lake Park, then unwind at Mastry’s off Central Ave. during spring training.
Fast forward to this year, the county hosted back-to-back tournaments, the NFCA and ESPN college softball tournaments, featuring 12 ranked teams, including the top two in the country.
“This shows how the best teams in the country come to Clearwater to start the year,” said Caleb Peterson, Director of the Sports Commission for Visit St. Pete-Clearwater, during a Tourist Development Council (TDC) meeting Wednesday morning.
The ESPN tournament isn’t new, either, but its continued success has cast a wider net of interest to new tournament organizers.
This year, 82 teams participated in the college softball tournaments. Of those, 80 traveled from out of state, creating a significant economic impact.
According to Peterson, those out-of-state teams generated roughly 5,000 room nights, a key metric used to measure lodging demand and tourism revenue.
“There’s some great things happening in the youth space, because of some of the high-level things we’ve done in softball,” Peterson added.
That success is trickling down into other youth sports.
In hockey, the county’s four ice rinks, two in Clearwater and two in Oldsmar, are seeing more use. Tournament organizers from places like Canada and Chicago have filled those rinks from December through February for youth sports.
The county has also seen niche growth in events like cliff diving, strongman competitions, foot volleyball, cornhole and even quidditch.
“There’s all these wide-world-of-sports opportunities that are always looking for attractive destinations that know that if they bring their event to Pinellas they are going to draw registrations,” Peterson said.
Over the last fiscal year, Pinellas hosted 53 sports events, generating about 51,000 room-nights and roughly $30 million in direct spending, according to Peterson.
Much of that impact is driven by baseball and softball, in part because the county has an abundance of diamond-shaped fields. That imbalance, however, points to a gap.
There is growing demand for rectangular fields to accommodate sports like soccer, football and field hockey. The 235-acre Toy Town landfill remains in the county’s sightline as a potential space to develop for more fields. But more studies are needed, as well as the right pitch to develop it, without knowing yet what’s still buried under the ground.
“It’s an exciting time. There’s a lot of demand for Pinellas,” Peterson said. “Our biggest challenge is checking the facilities box to have the requisite number of fields and space for tournaments.”