An increased effort to sell Rhode Island as a destination for sporting events has started to show results, and the state’s tourism leaders expect that it will bear even more fruit as time goes on.
In fact, they view events such as the 2010 National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Men’s Basketball Regional round and the 2008 U.S. Figure Skating’s U.S. Synchronized Team Skating Championships, to be held at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, as the first step in getting tourists to come to the region again and again.
Additional events on tap for the state include the National Junior College Athletic Association’s cross country championship in November 2008, the NJCAA’s annual meeting in 2009, and a paintball tournament at the University of Rhode Island’s campus in Kingston.
And according to James McCarvill, the executive director of the R.I. Convention Center Authority, which operates the R.I. Convention Center and the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, the state also wants to host the U.S. Figure Skating Championship (last held in Providence in 1995), as well as the NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championships. In addition to these events, the Dunk has bread-and-butter sporting events such as Providence College basketball and the Providence Bruins minor-league hockey.
“Our theory is that, the more we expose people [from out of state] to the destination, whether they are actually using the Dunk or the convention center, it eventually accrues to our benefit,” McCarvill said.
John Gibbons, who was hired last December to book sports-related events by the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau, said that an event like the NCAA men’s tournament would fill 782 hotel rooms on the event’s busiest night in the area.
“Sports is kind of the great thing that fills in those nights when the hotels need the business. Friday and Saturday nights their corporate business is nonexistent,” he said.
Sports events also have made a mark on the state economy. According to John Mousseau, the executive director at the Rhode Island Sports Council, the estimated economic impact of sports events hosted in Rhode Island since 1993 is $330 million.
“It’s a good time to be working on sports marketing, because we’ve got new hotel rooms that are coming online, we’ve got the renovations at the Dunk, we’ve got John [Gibbons], we’ve got a lot going on,” said Kristen Adamo, vice president of marketing and communications for the PWCVB.
Adamo said the bureau has been advertising in venues such as Sports Travel magazine, which is geared towards sports planners. She said that she is working with Gibbons on a sports guide for this fall, which will be “one-stop shopping” for people looking for sports facilities.
One of those new sports events coming to Rhode Island next fall is a high school cross country meet that will draw about 2,200 high schools from New England and New York.
Aron Taylor, the president of BorderChallenge Championships in Salt Lake City, an independent organization that organizes national cross-country running championships nationwide, is bringing the North Atlantic Region XC Championship to Goddard State Park in Warwick this November. He said he chose Rhode Island because it is centrally located within the region – and that Gibbons helped sell the location by bringing him to the Ocean State for a visit.
