SportsTravel Podcast

Rob Stull was elected president of the International Modern Pentathlon Union in November 2024, a four-year tenure that includes the 2028 Olympic Summer Games in Los Angeles. Stull was an alternate to the 1984 U.S. Olympic modern pentathlon team, competed in both fencing and modern pentathlon at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, then competed in modern pentathlon at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Starting at the LA28 Games, modern pentathlon will replace equestrian riding with obstacle racing after a long process that took several years. Modern pentathlon is a five-sport event that, for 2028, will include fencing, freestyle swimming, obstacle course racing, laser pistol shooting and cross-country running. We discussed the lead-up to LA28, Stull’s work at the international federation since being elected president and much more. 

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John Kemp may be the perfect person to be at the helm at the Lakeshore Foundation. As you’ll hear in this episode, his passion for the adaptive sports community isn’t just professional. It’s personal. Born without arms and legs, Kemp had to adjust at an early age to his surroundings, and managed to play baseball even if his career may not have been worthy of the Hall of Fame as he’ll discuss. He has, however, gone on to a Hall of Fame career when it comes to advocacy for the disability movement. His previous leadership roles include serving as the national executive director of United Cerebral Palsy Associations, president and CEO of VSA Arts and VSA Arts International, and as general counsel and vice president of development for the National Easter Seal Society, among others. In 1995, he co-founded the American Association of People with Disabilities. He recently served as president and CEO of the Viscardi Center and Henry Viscardi School in New York.

But in 2021, he was named president at CEO of the Lakeshore Foundation. The foundation has taken on different forms over the years but traces its origins all the way to 1925 as the Jefferson Tuberculosis Sanitorium. Since then, its focus has turned to a much wider spectrum, and in 1984 began as something close to its current form as the Lakeshore Foundation, with Jeff Underwood taking the helm as the first president and CEO. As the relatively new leader, Kemp oversees a program that is now an official U.S. Paralympic Training site, and serves over 4,000 people annually through its various programs. Last year, it opened its Sports Science & Performance Center, a first-of-its-kind program that will help fuel the pipeline for Team USA and other elite athletes through a performance lab, strength and conditioning center and nutrition lab among other things.

In this conversation, we’re going to discuss Lakeshore’s amazing history, the rise of the Paralympic movement, the opportunities ahead with the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles and perhaps most importantly, what host cities and venues need to know about serving the community of adaptive sports athletes.

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Major League Cricket returned to Broward County Stadium in Lauderhill, Florida, over the Fourth of July weekend for a series of T20 cricket matches featuring the league’s six franchises from New York, Texas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington. The stadium in Lauderhill was one of the sites that was used for the 2024 T20 Cricket World Cup, of which Johnny Grave was the chief executive officer. Grave took over the position of CEO at Major League Cricket in the league’s offseason and joins the podcast to talk about the sport’s growth in the United States and plans to further that growth, being part of the LA28 Olympic program and much more.

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Under the direction of Bob Kendrick, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City has become a must-see venue for fans of baseball and American history. It chronicles the journey of black baseball players and coaches, highlighting the elite-level competition the Negro Leagues provided. The museum is currently 10,000 square feet, but Kendrick has started the “Pitch for the Future Campaign” to raise $35 million to build a new, larger museum. Kendrick has also become somewhat of a celebrity in recent years thanks to his appearances on the video game MLB The Show, in which he narrates a special Negro Leagues storyline.

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Ray Allen played 18 seasons in the NBA and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 2018. Allen was a 10-time NBA All-Star and won an Olympic gold medal as a member of the 2000 United States men's basketball team. In 2021, he was selected to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team, having won two NBA championships, one with the Boston Celtics and one with the Miami Heat.

Leroy Arrington is General Manager at ESPN Wide World Of Sports In Disney World and leads the operations, strategy and guest experience at one of the largest and most prestigious multi-sport venues in the world. They joined the Podcast for a recording over Memorial Day Weekend about being a sports dad, the youth sports scene, organizing events at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex and much more.

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Ed McCaffrey has long known success on the football field. From his college days in Stanford, where he met his wife who was an accomplished soccer player for the university as well, to his playing days with the New York Giants, San Francisco 49ers and Denver Broncos from 1991 through 2003, his career found him as teammates with other legends of the sport and in rare company. His Super Bowl win with the 49ers and two victories with the Broncos put him in the game’s elite — plus a fourth ring from the Broncos as a team broadcaster during their most recent victory at Super Bowl 50.

But it was Super Bowl XXXII in San Diego when the Broncos upset the favored Green Bay Packers — think John Elway helicoptering his way into the end zone — that put the Colorado franchise over the hump after several tough Super Bowl losses years earlier. After his playing days, McCaffrey stayed involved in the sport, coaching at the high school and college level in Colorado and raising four sons who played college football, with three now in the NFL as either players or coaches, including Christian McCaffrey, who was a Heisman runner-up at Stanford and remains one of the game’s elite players.

In this conversation we talk with Ed about his playing days and what it was like to travel the NFL circuit with his teammates, his approach to getting his kids involved in sports, his background running youth sports camps, the inclusion of flag football at the 2028 Olympic Games and his burgeoning food empire that once featured his own breakfast cereal and now focuses on mustards, horseradish products and protein snacks. It’s a revealing conversation with someone who remains a hero in the towns in which he played.

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SportsTravel’s coverage of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, which will be the biggest ever with 48 teams and 16 host cities spread across three countries, has been extensive. Throughout the process from FIFA’s visiting host city candidates, to the day of the announcement in July 2022 of which cities will host games and an inside view of what it was like, SportsTravel has detailed the saga ahead of the schedule announcement in early February.

[article_sidebar]To say that soccer and enterprise are in Dan Hunt’s blood would be putting it lightly. Son of late American sports icon Lamar Hunt, whose legacy includes founding the American Football League, the Kansas City Chiefs, Major League Soccer and World Championship Tennis, Dan Hunt brought FC Dallas to Frisco, Texas, and made Toyota Stadium a reality. Hunt not only is president of FC Dallas, but he was also chair of the FIFA World Cup 2026 Dallas Bid Committee. In this episode, he discusses the Hunt family legacy, what the World Cup will mean for Dallas and how Frisco has emerged as a sporting destination.

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For decades, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association has been polling Americans about their participation levels in more than 100 sports and activities. The data, released annually in their Topline Participation Report, breaks those numbers down by individual sports and activities, types of sports like water sports, winter sports or racquet sports, and also by gender, age and income levels. The result is an incredibly comprehensive look at who is playing what and what the barriers might be for others based on their gender, age and income levels among other factors. Their latest report, whose research was led by senior director and head of research Alex Kerman — our guest on this episode — is filled with interesting data.

[article_sidebar]As far as the headlines go, the great news is that people are moving more. For the first time, the report concluded that over 80 percent of Americans are active in something, which means they participate in one of those sports or activities at least once last year. And what are they playing? Well, once again pickleball is by far the fastest-growing sport, at least by percentage of new people reporting that they play. Pickleball, however, isn’t the only success story. Team sports in general are trending upward, including many that were on the program at the last Olympic Games or that will make their debut at the 2028 Olympic Games, like flag football, which was another winner. In this conversation, we break down the numbers from this fascinating report, talk about why the growth sports are growing and what the next big thing may be in the years to come. 

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Laura Gainor’s background in pickleball is significant, as she was around the sport in some of its earlier days before it became a national phenomenon. During her time in marketing at USA Pickleball, she witnessed first-hand how the sport was taking off. Today, of course, the numbers speak for themselves. In last year’s Topline Participation Report produced by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, the group’s researchers reported that pickleball grew 58 percent in participation in the previous year. And over the past three years, that participation has grown by some 223 percent.

As a result, brands are looking to get involved with the sport any way they can and event organizers are searching for ways to activate a pickleball experience around their events as well. And development is coming in, too. Entire communities around the country are being planned with pickleball courts in mind to allow people more access to play. Gainor saw the writing on the wall for all these trends and launched Pickleball in the Sun as a way to help brands, event organizers and others navigate the fast-evolving world of pickleball. In this conversation, we discuss how those brands look different today, what you should know about including pickleball as a component of your event, where the sport is going and what, if anything, may slow its momentum.

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Travis Murphy’s work background is a fascinating one, and one that you may not realize is a key component of the sports industry behind the scenes. Before starting his company Jetr Global Sport + Entertainment, he previously served as the senior director of international government affairs for the National Basketball Association. In that role, he helped thousands of NBA, WNBA, 2K, G League, and Basketball Africa League teams, players, staff and their families navigate the complicated world of global travel. He also managed the NBA’s relationships with the Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, and other government institutions, working with those government partners to create sustainable basketball initiatives both domestically and abroad. In that regard, he also played a key role in the release of Brittney Griner from her detainment in Russia in 2022. Murphy has extensive international experience, having served as a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service, working at embassies in Ecuador, Suriname and Cote d’Ivoire to name a few. And he also served in Washington, D.C., in the Sports Diplomacy Division of the Department of State. 

All of that background puts him in a unique position to advocate for policy changes in Washington around issues of immigration that stand to have large impacts on some of the largest events headed to the United States. In just one area — but one with outsized importance — the issue of wait times for visitors to get an appointment for a visa to visit the United States is raising some serious alarms. In Colombia, for example, there is nearly a two-year wait time to get one of those appointments, meaning if you are a traveler hoping to watch the Colombian team at the 2026 World Cup, you’re already too late. In this conversation, we talk about why those waits are so long in so many countries around the world and what our industry can be doing to help reduce those times. We also talk about the impact a new administration in Washington will have on the ability for spectators to easily come for international events and how the broader national discussion on immigration policy in general could impact that ability as well. It’s a deep dive into some serious but important topics that will have lasting implications on the willingness of event organizers overseas to consider the United States as a host to their events in the years to come.

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