JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Does college football bowl season make a difference in Jacksonville? If it does, what does the future look like for the Gator Bowl and other events?
Sports tourism is our topic on This Week in Jacksonville: Business Edition.
College football seems to be in disarray with the controversy concerning the undefeated Florida State University team’s exclusion from the four-team college football playoff. That did not negatively affect Jacksonville’s annual TaxSlayer Gator Bowl. Clemson and Kentucky both provided entertainment in the game and enjoyed all that Northeast Florida has to offer.
And the Gator Bowl is just one of many important sporting events to drive income and growth in the region.
“There’s everything from Little League through senior sports and traditional sports and also sports that you never even thought about really being sports,” Michael Corrigan who is the president and CEO of Visit Jacksonville and joined us on the podcast. “And those all merged together to create a huge economic engine. And probably the biggest difference in sports, tourism and much of tourism, it’s extremely competitive.”
Alan Verlander is also part of the show. He’s the former athletic director at Jacksonville University from 2005 to 2012. Verlander runs his own sports management company called Airstream Ventures since 2018, and he was an executive with the Jacksonville Sports Council.
“The Gator Bowl was started in the forties as a tourism initiative by the leaders because in between Christmas and New Year’s was so dead in the hotels and the tourism industry,” Verlander said. “And so now fast forward, 77 years later, they had another successful game. You look at the fans, our offices are down around there. We run a tailgate area around there.”
Verlander said fans come from all over the country to the sporting event.
“they’re filling up at a time [...] that the hotels need business, that restaurants need business, that downtown, all the different areas, the beaches where they do all the events need that economic driver.”
Beyond football, what does the sports tourism scene look like? What are the areas of growth already on the way? Verlander and Corrigan discuss it at length, including the ways to an economic impact in the multi-millions.