SportsTravel Podcast

If you don’t follow surfing terribly closely, you may not know that Coco Ho comes from a legendary surfing family that is considered Hawaiian surfing royalty. Her father is pro surfing pioneer Michael Ho, considered the godfather of the North Shore surf scene on Oahu. Michael had a 25-year career that included two Triple Crows and finished No. 3 in the world. Meanwhile, her Uncle Derek was the 1993 World Champion and a four-time Triple Crown winner. And her older brother Mason competed as well, eventually coaxing her into competition.

[article_sidebar]The results were immediate. After a solid amateur career, Coco joined the Championship Tour in 2009, won the Rip Curl Search event in Portugal, and nabbed the rookie of the year honor for finishing No. 4 in the world. At 17 years old, she was the youngest woman ever to make the women’s tour of the World Surf League. An injury caused her to pull out of the 2019 season, but she is working her way back and plans to compete at the Vans U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach.

The knee injury that set her back isn’t the only thing in her career that has been a challenge. Years back, she was diagnosed we atopic dermitis, a skin condition that is exacerbated by exposure to sand, water, salt, sweat, stress — all the things that go along with being a professional surfer. In this conversation, we talk with Coco about her upbringing in one of the toughest sports around, her journey to the tour, her ability to cope under adversity and her thoughts about surfing’s debut in the Olympics last year in Tokyo.

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The World Games is an international multisport event that gets underway on July 7 with the Opening Ceremony at Protective Stadium in Birmingham, Alabama. The event will culminate a seven-year planning process after the Alabama destination was first awarded host duties and will feature 30 official sports in 54 disciplines, which will be contested at 30 venues across the Birmingham area. We talked with World Games Chief Executive Officer Nick Sellers and David Galbaugh, vice president of sports sales and marketing for the Greater Birmingham Convention & Visitors Bureau, about everything involved with the event.

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TOCA recently became the largest operator of indoor soccer centers in the United States after adding locations in Dallas, Cleveland, Nashville, Chicago and Denver. In addition, the company launched TOCA Social, a soccer entertainment and dining venue, in London with plans to expand to additional two UK locations as well as Dallas in 2023. TOCA was founded in 2016 by two-time U.S. World Cup and former MLS and English Premier League midfielder Eddie Lewis, building off a training idea that he developed during his professional career. TOC recently announced a landmark investment from Premier League player and England national team captain Harry Kane, one of the world’s most high-profile players.

In this episode, we talk with Lewis about how TOCA came about, how it intends to expand and why the sport lends itself to the entertainment space as well as the training space.

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This is the second time we’ve had Al Kidd and Jennifer Stoll on the SportsTravel Podcast. The last time was in early 2020 when the pandemic was just becoming evident and an incredible amount of unknown lied ahead. The Sports Events & Tourism Assocaition had just released data from its first comprehensive State of the Industry report, which covered data from 2019 — right before the world fell off a cliff. In turns out the timing of that study couldn’t have been more perfect since it reflected the high point of the industry, and offered a benchmark to use to determine how the recovery from the global pandemic would be measured in years to come. That 2019 report showed that sports-related travel had a direct economic impact of $45 billion that year.

Fast forward to now, and Sports ETA has its latest data that covers how bad things got in 2020, but more importantly, how things rebounded in 2021. The headline number out of the latest report, sponsored by the Northstar Meetings Group,  is that sports-related travel accounted for $39.7 billon in 2021 — almost a full recovery to the 2019 numbers.

Nonetheless, the full State of the Industry report paints an even more detailed picture of what the industry looked like last year. From hotel room stays to tax revenue generated, to impacts on sports-related staffing at CVBs and sports commissions and sports-related budgets in those destinations, the latest report is a data gold mine. In this episode, we sit down with Kidd, the president and CEO of Sports ETA, and Stoll, the founder of Stoll Strategies, to talk through not only the details of the statistics in the report, but how we can all use this information to advocate for the importance of sports-related travel and tell a more global story of why the work we do day in and day out matters. 

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Starting June 5 at Exploria Stadium, the 2022 Special Olympics USA Games will unite more than 5,500 athletes and coaches from all 50 states and the Caribbean and 125,000 spectators. This event will have 19 Olympic-style team and individual sports and 30 events at venues across Orlando. We talked with the president and chief executive officer of this year’s Games, Joe Dzaluk, about the work that has gone into setting up the event over the past four years, how COVID interrupted and changed planning, how Orlando has adopted the Games as a major event and much more.

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One of the many sports vying for the chance to be included in the program for the 2028 Olympic Summer Games in Los Angeles is teqball, a soccer-based sport founded in 2014 in Hungary. Played on a specially curved table called a Teq Table, the sport has 60 official registered clubs and will have several tournament events throughout the summer on ESPN’s various platforms. We talked with AJ Nwosu, the chief executive officer of USA Teqball, about what the sport is about, his introduction to teqball, growing the sport across the country, its Olympic dreams and more.

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Neil Schwartz, the president and chief data officer of SBRnet, has spent decades researching sports fans, including their willingness to travel. In his company’s latest research report — the 2022 Study of Sports Fans — he has insights on which sports fans travel the most to attend or participate in events. He also has research showing which specific collegiate and professional teams’ fans are most likely to travel to away games in different sports. The data also analyze esports fans and their willingness to travel to events, reaching some interesting conclusions. Combined, the data offer a fascinating insight into the mindset of the traveling sports fan and provide valuable information for destinations and venues looking to book events in the future.

Schwartz will also be a featured presenter at the upcoming EsportsTravel Summit, June 21–23, in Daytona Beach, Florida, where he will present more of his esports research. For more information on that event, visit esportstravelsummit.com.

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The United States will host the Rugby World Cup in 2031 and Women’s Rugby World Cup in 2033, planting a flag in the ground for the sport stateside by World Rugby, the international federation in charge of the event. The announcement also completes a remarkable comeback for USA Rugby, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2020 before it emerged from bankruptcy last year. In this episode, SportsTravel Managing Editor Matt Traub talked with Ross Youngand Jim Brown about the bid process, the emotions of World Rugby’s official announcement, deciding on 2031 and 2033 for the tournaments it wanted to host, what this will mean for the sport throughout the United States, what the organization has learned from when it hosted the 2018 Rugby Sevens World Championship in San Francisco and much more.

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In the increasing competitive collegiate landscape, it is becoming harder and harder to stand out. But Coastal Carolina University is a prime example of a university that has managed its growth well, fielding a football team that has become a powerhouse out of nowhere in recent years and a formidable basketball program. Its new football stadium is already paying dividends, hosting the Myrtle Beach Bowl, one of the newest bowl games on the schedule. Coastal’s longtime athletics director, Matt Hogue, joined us recently to explain how one school has plotted its growth and what other universities and communities can learn about how to make a splash on the largest stage possible. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

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Scott Howson was named president of the American Hockey League in February 2020 with plans for a short transition period before assuming control ahead of the 2020–2021 season. Obviously the sports landscape, along with the world landscape, looks a lot different now than it did a little more than two years ago. Howson worked during the pandemic to steer the league through a shortened 2020–2021 season that saw no Calder Cup playoffs. This season, the AHL has steered through the winter difficulties of the omicron variant to put itself on track for a full regular season and playoffs thanks to the support of medical experts and the National Hockey League as well. The AHL’s future also looks bright with the incoming addition of a team in the Coachella Valley starting next season in a new venue.

In this episode, Howson talks with SportsTravel managing editor Matt Traub about how a kid who grew up loving hockey turned it into not just a playing career but a post-playing career as a sports executive.

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