 Welcome to the Sports Playbook, where we discuss solutions to issues that impact sports. I'm your host, Angela Hazelett. Today's guest is Roxanne Steinhoff, Attorney and Lead Consultant at Steinhoff Law. Today we are going to discuss sports tourism and destination marketing considerations before the big game. Let's get to it. Welcome, Roxanne. Thank you for joining us today on the Sports Playbook. Well, Angela, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. Roxanne, you have a really rich history with sports tourism and involvement with destination marketing. Tell me, what does, what are those terms mean? Yeah, great question to start us off. So sports tourism, just in general, is hosting athletic events to drive visitors to a destination. So of course that goes hand in hand with destination marketing, as destination marketing is of course advertising a particular jurisdiction, a city, a town, a county, a state, a nation, whatever it may be, advertising that destination to attract visitors. So you have kind of this marriage between destination marketing as kind of the big picture and then sports tourism as a niche part of destination marketing. So one of the avenues to attract visitors would be through sports tourism. Yes, that's correct. Well, let's lean into that a little bit more. And some of your background has been working with the Boston 2024 Olympic and Paralympic bid committee, working at the Chicago Sports Commission, hosting, helping them host major international sports events and providing sport tourism consulting. Now you run a legal and consulting firm that specializes in serving sports commissions, destination marketing organizations, and tourism bureaus. So from this collective experience, what are some of the key things that you learned about what it takes to bring a successful sporting event into a community? Yeah, you know, I think the bottom line and what makes doing sport tourism a success for tourism so fun for sports commissions or tourism bureaus is you have to love your destination, right? I mean, that's the bottom line is you have to have a great destination to get people to come and visit or sports or just for general tourism. And usually that's pretty easy. We all have great destinations, but I think to really be successful in this industry and be successful in what you do is you have to plan for events to benefit not just visitors, but of course your residents. And that's why sports tourism is so powerful because everyone gets on board with sports. There's this very famous quote from Nelson Mandela talking about how sports is the universal language. And that's so true. It's true across time and space and borders. And so, again, to be successful in driving a visitation to your destinations through sports, you need to find a way to bring those activities and those facilities and those events also to your residents. And it really helps bridge the gap between the tourism industry and the tourism community with your local residents. I love that. And the powerful impact of sports to cross cultures, languages and geographic boundaries, even. And talk to me about what has changed in sports tourism since COVID. Yeah, great question. Traditionally, the destination working space for tourism, we are a space. People use tourism via destination marketing organization interchangeably. I'll just refer to them as DMOs, destination marketing organization. Just know that it comes as all of the above, right? A traditional metric for success for DMOs and sports commissions has been heads and bets. So, you know, getting those visitors in and making sure that you can wrap up hotel roommates. Well, of course, as we all know with COVID, we that didn't work out so well for everybody, right? And I mean, the heads and bets metric goes right along with how a lot of tourism bureaus, DMOs, sports commissions are funded. Traditionally, they've been funded through hotel taxes. And of course, until that happened, nobody was getting any kind of funding out of hotel taxes and roommates. And so during COVID and coming out of COVID, there's been a huge shift in the tourism industry as a whole, and especially in sports tourism, because heads and beds is not really the quantitative or qualitative metric that is really encompassing of what you're trying to do at the whole destination. Remember, I said at the beginning, the key to success is creating a program or events facilities that will also benefit your residents. And of course, you can make the argument that heads and beds generate economic impact, which is a huge reason, if not the main reason. Of why these organizations this, however, it has to be more than and we've seen from COVID that it's not so much about heads and beds anymore. What it's really about is providing this holistic experience for your visitors and your residents and making sure that you have a sustainable and responsible strategy to keep your destination. Interesting and not say the metric is more than just the number of hotel rooms that are that are booked during that time period. And I know that hosting large national international events can be really expensive. You mentioned historically there's been like a hotel tax and that made sense, at least pre COVID that might have made sense to assess that tax. But what other places is the world's the funding come from? Particularly if it's a city is the one that is hosting a particular event? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, it really depends on the destination and the event. A lot of times, right? I mean, the Olympics, of course, are not just funded by heads and beds, hotel taxes, right? I think that's a microscopic piece of that puzzle. It really depends on the destination and your jurisdiction. So hotel taxes still continuing to be a main artery for funding for sports commissions, which I guess we should back up and say what the sports commissions actually do. Sports commissions are usually a department or an arm of a DML and they're responsible for bringing in sports events. You do have some sports commissions that are completely independent. They're all organization separately funded, but most sports commissions at least in the United States are a part of the DML. And so going back to the hotel taxes still reign supreme, I would say. Some other methods that have come up with funding, it's sports commissions specifically have been tourism improvement districts, which is an assessment model, very similar to the tax of some key differences. Number one, whoever is paying the tax, which is these are businesses in the tourism industry, usually hotels, but more and more and you're seeing restaurants and retail and other businesses that are in the tourism industry that benefit from the activities of sports commissions and DML do, they're the ones that have the assessment. Assessments also only last for a certain period of time, unlike taxes. And most importantly, assessments can't be diverted by the government, right? I mean, the government are the ones who decide how taxes are going to be dispersed. So that's why assessments are so powerful because there's a legal protection to the businesses that voted in the assessment. They're supposed to be benefiting directly. So that very much is becoming a popular method of funding sports commissions and tourism bureaus. Down you're talking about the event and specifically, of course, the tourism bureau and sports mission funding, a lot of that goes into bringing these events. It's the main funding sports most of the time. We also private private funding sources after COVID, the federal government gave out grants for the first time to tourism bureaus. So I don't know how long that is going to last into the future, but that was a funding source. And now there's some precedent for that, right? Now we've done the course, so maybe there's more opportunity. Sponsorship is also a huge piece of course, especially when you're talking about big high-profile sports events. And then also many times, especially when you're talking about the Olympics, Super Bowl or these major events, there will be some other kind of public funding elements. So overall, again, it depends on the destination. It depends what the event is. It depends on what legal mechanisms you have to get funding, but there's a wide range of things. But on the sports mission and DMO side, I would say it's still very much rooted in hotel taxes and becoming more popular. Interesting the assessment piece. We're talking about these like tourism improvement districts. And who determines who is part of those districts? Yeah, that's a very good question. So because the businesses have to pay the assessment, ultimately have to approve the assessment. A lot of the times when the Tourism Bureau's sports commissions are putting together their proposal for the district, this is a political strategic piece, right? I mean, if they know, they've got a Nutellier who is not a purpose, let's say, to put so say diplomatically, somebody they know that may not be supportive, they may find a way to cut that hotelier out. However, that also provides some political risk, right? Because then all your other hotels might say, well, this person is going to get one of this business. How is this fair? So as far as determining how to draw your district and what the boundaries are, I mean, this very, all the work really goes into the front end. Before you even bring it to your hoteliers or your business, whoever you would like to contribute to the assessment, that strategic piece, all that work needs to be done on the front end. So then you're not going through the actual process, and there's a, we'll call it a political process, right? Some other factors that determine the jurisdiction, a lot of it will depend on your enabling statutes or, so I guess we'll be back up also. Tourism improvement districts, the assessment model, there's two ways that you can inform them. One is by a grant from state statute, which is how most of them are formed. There are, to my knowledge, 20 some states that have specifically tourism improvement districts enabling legislation at the state level. Most states have a business improvement district enabling statute and some destinations have used their existing bid statute to create these districts. But preferably the best way forward would be to enable a state statute. Now you can also use as a local jurisdiction, you can also use your home rule authority, which all, it depends on your state, but local governments have some degree of their own independent in a mere authority. So depending on how your state treats that kind of local authority, that can be not true. And that's something under a home rule authority have a little bit of flexibility because you're not necessarily constrained to the state statute. So I say all of that to get back to your question on the districts who actually decide the boundaries of these districts and what they look like. Sometimes your enabling statute will belegate you to a county or a city, something like that. A lot of them allow you to expand outside of local government, first digital boundaries. So you could have districts that could span multiple cities or multiple counties. It just really depends on what you're using as your authority. Yeah. I imagine that would get really complicated if something like Kansas City that straddles two state lines, it probably makes it even more complicated to assess funding for a particular event. But let's talk a little bit about, you worked for the Boston 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Committee or with them. And they did win the bid from the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Eventually they was decided that Boston would not move forward with that bid process. And I'm curious from your perspective, like how does a city or how does an entity decide that it is not the best for them to move forward in hosting an event? Yeah, that's a great question. So yes, my first job coming out of grad school, I worked for until holiday, which is the major advertising agency. And they were doing a lot of the marketing and advertising pro bono for Boston 2024. So it was a very interesting situation. So I technically worked for the agency, but my only account was Boston. So we're reporting directly to the Olympic Committee. And Boston was really a unique situation for a number of reasons. The first reason is this was really the first time greater social media played a huge role in what was going on as far as support for the bid. So this is circa 2013 to 2015 as when this process was the U.S. OPC now, excuse me, selected Boston in the winter of 2014. And then Boston was the U.S. city going into the 254 bid cycle. When that happens, all of a sudden, Boston's 254 was on the stage, both nationally and at home. And of course, Boston has a very rich history with governments and major powers coming into play in that city, of course. And so I think a few things happened in Boston. Number one, the fact that the city was even bidding for the Olympics at all was relatively quiet. I don't think that was necessarily intentional, but a lot of people in the city didn't know about this. And now all of a sudden there was this big announcement that Boston was putting its hat in and was the U.S. election. That's number one. Number two, that time was one of the worst winters in Boston on record. They closed the transit system trying to remember it was at least five or six times. There was a huge snowpile that they had in Seaport, which is a district by the ocean, and that snowpile did not melt until July because of how much snow there was. And so I think unfortunately that was a perfect showcase of the city not being able to handle some major thing that was going on. And if you're a general citizen in Boston, I mean, you can't even get to work because the T is up working, right? And then all of a sudden here that there's this little bid. And so there's a lot of consternation about that. And then finally, like I mentioned earlier, this was really the first time where you had a very, very mobilized and dedicated group against the Olympics. You've had those four, but social media was changed. So my job was running the social media for Boston. So this was, I lived and ate this every single day, 24 hours a day. And it was very interesting to see that there was really about, I would say like 30 people who were just on top of Twitter all the time. And those people really drove the conversation in a lot of ways. And you could see the media picking up, what they were saying, because they were so active. You know, whether that's right or wrong, I won't dive into that. But it was absolutely in your backer. And so by the time that August came around in 2015, we held a debate between the CEO of Boston by four and the leader of the no Boston Olympics. And actually, completely objectively, a lot of went well for Boston, especially by four. But the final piece was the IOC wanted the state of Massachusetts to back in. And the governor at that time was hesitant to do so without a study on what the economic impact is going to be and how this is going to affect the state as a whole. And that study hadn't come back yet. And so I think the USOBC was seeing a lot of negativity coming through, again, a lot of it on social media. This is how we reported. And they were questioning the governor to even support the bid on this timeline. And I think that was going to be that. So unfortunately, it was a perfect storm. Right, literally, the picker tibally. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's really interesting, the details or the factors that contributed to that. And the International Olympic Committee's pressure probably was a nail on the coffin, it sounds like. And I knew Chicago had a similar situation, contemplating a bid for the 2026 World Cup. Talk to us about the reasons for not moving forward with that process. Yeah, yeah. So when I was with the Chicago Sports Commission, so coming off of Boston to make my four, I went to work for the Chicago Sports Commission, which is an ARB of Q Chicago, the Tourism Bureau for the City of Chicago. And as you mentioned, Chicago was one of the internet cities for the FIFA Men's World Cup in 2026. So that process is very similar to the Olympic process, where you have a nation do a selection process before it even goes to FIFA. United 2026, of course, is for the first time a re-nation conglomerate bid. So it's Canada, Mexico, and the United States. And so during this process, we were one of the US cities that was trying to get the United 2026 Committee, so the Canada of Expo, and US bids to get them to select Chicago. And we went through this process pretty far. I mean, and this is not just the Tourism Bureau and the Sports Commission, this city. This is our venue partners field, all your practice facilities. And there's quite a bit that goes into this, and we go pretty far. Ultimately, what it came down to, there's a few factors. I mean, first of all, this is a huge financial responsibility that cities have to back. That's what FIFA requires. So it's certainly a political issue. That's the first thing. The second thing was some of the venue requirements. Of course, Soldier Field is a hollowed traditional venue that limited some of the gains that the city of Chicago could go after. There's also a lot to this, right? I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't a bad investment from that point. It's just a coincidence. And what it really came down to was the promises and the guarantees that the city as a whole had to sign on to, who were just too much for the administration. It was too much for the venues. It was a huge risk. And so after going through this process and getting pretty far into it, the city and the Chicago bid committee, which is, again, made up of lots of different groups and several different people, made the joint decision to withdraw. And thinking about that, of course, it's always a bower. It's a bower. You want to be a World Cup city. You want to be a Olympic city. And you brought up the point also. Chicago was an Olympic fitting city, too, at one point. And so actually the Chicago Sports Commission was a direct legacy of the Chicago 2016 bid, where Chicago made it all the way into the final round of IOC selection, and unfortunately didn't get selected. And so I think that was part of it, too, is there was a concern about being put in that position again, putting all of this forward and then not being selected. But on the other hand, I mean the one major advantage of a huge city like Chicago, America's sort of largest city, deciding to withdraw from the Olympic bid, is during 2026, that's the whole summer of keeping your, or a whole month and a half, or keeping your venues offline. And these are all, or most of the US's major cities. And so the advantage for Chicago was who was going to take all those events that normally had. Who's going to take those Taylor Swift concerts? Who's going to take those Beyonce concerts? Who's going to take those major conventions that need that convention space that is now going to be tied up with United 2026 and all these other destinations? So Brian, that was a major consideration, too, and ultimately was the right decision for the city. And why, as a whole, Chicago, the Chicago bid contingent for 2026 decided ultimately to withdraw? Yeah, that makes sense. A lot of valid reasons and concerns. And tell us, just kind of an overview, if you can, of some of the events that you actually were able to help be part of. Yeah, absolutely. So I sent over a few pictures, so we can, I don't know if we want to pull those up, but one of my, let's see what, this one's the labor cup, yes. So the labor cup was one of my favorite events that I got to be a part of when I was at the sports commission. I was a part of this from bin to host, which feels really good for anybody in this world. You work so hard to get the bid, then you get the bid, you spend a year, or sometimes three or four years, maybe even longer, compared to these events. Labor cup, I think it was two years that we had the pair out here, roughly. And the labor cup, for those who don't know, is the tennis version of the rider cup. So it was an idea that Roger Federer had a Team Europe versus the World concept, and it switched every year from Europe to a world destination. And Chicago was the second destination, first world destination. So it was an amazing event. Over 90,000 attendees, huge economic impact. It was fantastic. It was held in the United Center. So I think that was the first time the United Center was tennis in roughly 30 years. Something like that. Okay, another wonderful event. It was up there on the screen just a second ago, but the Big Ten, that picture right there, that is a picture from the Big Ten Men's Basketball 2019 final. I'm a native of Michigan. I graduated law school from Michigan State University, and it was a Michigan-Michigan State Final that went into double overtime. Yes, that was a lot of fun. That was a great time. Let's see, some other bets be hosted. Viva said a FIFA Women's World Cup viewing party in 2019. That's that picture right there. That was in Lincoln Park in the middle of Chicago. This is one of those relatively smaller scale events, but it was something that really brought our community together to cheer on the women's national teams. That was a wonderful event. Luckily, it was well attended. Yes, it was very well attended. Yeah, so we worked with US soccer to put that on. US soccer is based in Chicago. Another event, the last event that I did. Well, let's go to this one. This is the Adball Pick-Off. This is in 2019 celebrating the NFL's 100th anniversary, as well as the 100th birthday of the Bears. So a very natural anniversary celebration here. This is in Grant Park in Chicago, and that was Bears versus Packers, which was kind of fun. And then the final event, my very last event I hosted was the 2020 NBA All-Star Game. And that was the longest operation time. That was roughly three years from bid to selection to host. And it was a tremendous event. I will tell you, working with the NBA was a terrain. The NBA truly cares about showcasing the host city they're in, and they really made that All-Star game all about Chicago. So it was so much fun to host that. And a wonderful, wonderful event for this. Of those five events, was there any unique, surprising things that you didn't anticipate or things that you kind of learned? Oh, yeah, hosting those events. Oh, yes. You know, for those of us in the event world, once the train is out of the gate, you just go. And that always event week, there's not a whole lot of sleep. And always something comes up. There's always something that's going to come up and then have to deal with it. I guess an example, I ran the volunteer program for the labor cops that had roughly 300 volunteers who came in. I mean, talk about acting out impact. These people didn't even have tickets to come to the event. But there was volunteers from roughly 16 countries, 25 in some states that came in just to volunteer. And it was wonderful. It was amazing. But it was a lot of coordination and different levels of volunteers and figuring all of that out. So I think the biggest thing I've learned is all you can do is plan as best as you can, work your plan as best as you can, but also have some flexibility, because invariably something is going to come up where you're going to have to do some adjustments. And one final question for you. I know you have a really unique background of being a pyrotechnic operator, meaning that you set up and shoot off fireworks. So what advice would you give to event owners who want to incorporate a fireworks display into their event? Yeah. Thank you for asking that question. Yes, I am a certified pyrotechnician. I've been doing it for roughly 13 years. I think from the event sign, obviously this is a pretty dangerous endeavor. So from the event side, I mean, you have a lot of very, very excellent pyrotechnic companies that know what they're doing, whether it's an venue or outside or whatever it is. There's a lot of expertise in that industry. From the event perspective, I would just do your homework on your companies, make sure that you can trust them, of course talk with your insurance, because it might not even be worth it or feasible for you after talking with whoever does insurance if the insurance premium is too much. Now there are specialized insurance companies that do handle these kinds of dangerous things, so that's always an option. But just for our practical consideration, your insurance is kind of your first stop. And then again, just making sure that whoever you're working with has a really good reputation, you feel comfortable with them, and they have had some experience doing whatever you're looking for. You got some great skills there. You can advise clients on how to incorporate fireworks into their events or not. You know, yes. Yes, there's always a way. It's whether it is feasible, I surprise, but it's a liability perspective. Yes. Well, thank you for your time, Roxanne. I appreciate all the information and your wealth of experience. And thanks for sharing with us today. Oh, of course. Thank you so much for having me, Angela. I appreciate it. It was a great time. Absolutely. We appreciate you being here, sharing with us about sports tourism and destination marketing considerations before the big game. Thank you to our viewers for joining us today. Our next episode will be with Joseph Cooper, who is going to discuss racism in sport. We'll see you then.