When you think of sports tourism, you might think about taking a trip to the Olympics, or maybe Taylor Swift and crew making the rounds of NFL stadiums lately.
But sports tourism is much more than that. It’s everything from making a kayak trip to traveling with your family to a kids’ soccer tournament.
And it can all have a real impact on the environment.
That’s why Brooke Hansen, an associate professor at the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business, is specializing in Sports Tourism and sustainability.
Hansen says this booming industry in Florida needs to be managed — soon.
“Sports tourism can be traveling to get trained in a different sporting modality. You could be attending a golf camp somewhere. That’s sports tourism. You could also be traveling to go hiking, biking, kayaking, windsurfing. That’s all sports tourism, too. That’s why sports tourism, if you look at it from that lens, accounts for maybe as much as 25% of all tourism, so it is huge. We’re talking billions of dollars and millions of people.
Hansen also discussed other topics, including how the state can manage this growth in light of it’s burgeoning population.
Our Florida springs are amazing. We cannot send everyone there without a plan. And Hawaii, they have capacities now. Once a park or site reaches several 100 people, it’s now closed and you can’t go in until people come out. This has been going on in Costa Rica forever. If you go visit the Monteverde Cloud Forest, which is very popular, they only allow about 250 people per day,
Brooke Hansen, associate professor at the USF Muma College of Business
How are we doing in terms of managing this in the state of Florida?
We’ve taken it up a few notches recently. And Pasco County has dubbed itself the Sports Coast, which is a very clever marketing opportunity to promote skating, scalloping and ecotourism. So it’s really interesting that Pasco decided to do that. And it’s been enormously successful.
What are the downsides to that enormous success?
In general, the downsides to the enormous success of Florida tourism is its own success. We have 137 million people coming to the state of Florida. And there are aspirations to have Florida be the No. 1 destination in the world. So my question is, always, where are we putting these people, because many of us who live here, we can’t get to destinations like beaches because of the traffic, because of the overcrowding. So we really need to move more into a mode of destination management.
In my experiences, say kayaking and such, you go to Crystal River, you go to Weeki Wachee. Those places are stressed.
Our Florida springs are amazing. We cannot send everyone there without a plan. And Hawaii, they have capacities now. Once a park or site reaches several 100 people, it’s now closed and you can’t go in until people come out. This has been going on in Costa Rica forever. If you go visit the Monteverde Cloud Forest, which is very popular, they only allow about 250 people per day,
Who’s in charge of taking care of that management? Is it locals, county, state? Who’s doing anything along those lines right now?
In other parts of the world, we have ministries of tourism that work with ministries of environment, and do that very thing. We don’t have a ministry of tourism. So who’s in charge of tourism in our state? I’m the sustainable tourism specialist, helping everyone understand how we’re going to transform the largest industry in the world to sustainability. And that’s how we’re going to have a global impact. So that’s my passion. And that’s how I wound up on the sustainability committee for Super Bowl 55 when we had it here in Tampa; our recycling program for Super Bowl 55 was amazing. We were able to take a lot of the goods, even scraps of carpet and things like that, and donate them to nonprofit organizations. And I know we’re building a new stadium at USF. And I’m biding my time a little bit before I start poking my nose into that and making sure we are building a LEED-certified stadium. And I’m soon to pick up a phone and start pestering people to make sure that we’re making a sustainability statement with our new stadium.
