‘This ripple effect we’re seeing’: Delaware sports tourism brings in $5 million a week

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This story was supported by a statehouse coverage grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Youth lacrosse teams from across America routinely trek to the DE Turf sports complex along a rural stretch of central Delaware.

The Chase Fieldhouse is helping transform a gritty section of southern Wilmington by drawing kids’ soccer, basketball, volleyball and lacrosse clubs from other states.

Baseball teams from all over the country have been flocking for years to the Sports at the Beach facility in Sussex County.

Sports tournaments have gained a firm foothold in Delaware, and a new state study shows that the games have a serious economic impact.

The analysis, recently released by the Delaware Tourism Office, concluded that in 2023, visitor spending and tourney operations generated $258 million in spending statewide. That’s about $5 million a week.

In addition, the study found that the sports tournament business brought in another $150 million in indirect spending. That includes restaurants buying extra food and other supplies and equipment to gear up to serve big crowds of parents and kids, and spending by employees in entertainment and retail industries that sports tourism helps finance.

State and local governments in Delaware also benefited to the tune of $20.2 million in local taxes, with the games directly responsible for nearly 2,300 jobs in the hotel, food and beverage, and other industries.

Gov. John Carney, a former standout high school and college athlete who will become mayor of Wilmington in January, raved about the impact of sports tourism.

Carney, who competed in football, basketball, track and field and lacrosse in his younger days, called Delaware sports tourism “a major factor in our overall economy and a significant contributor to our state and local revenue. Travelers attending sports tournaments, races and other events, whether as participants or spectators, help to create thousands of jobs, support our small businesses and generate economic development throughout Delaware.”

Jessica Welch, the state’s tourism director, said Delaware has awarded millions of dollars in grants to facilities to improve fields, courts, seating and other amenities, and to tournament operators to attract more events so Delaware can keep grabbing a bigger share of the $128 billion annual global sports industry.

Welch said the boon in Delaware began in earnest during the coronavirus pandemic, when Carney lifted restrictions to allow for sports tournaments.

“Sports tourism was really COVID-proof, for lack of a better word, because people could still be outside, and we could still hold those tournaments and have people coming,’’ Welch said. “So that kind of set the bar for us, and really showed event operators and other states and athletes and their families and coaches that Delaware was ready to take on big tournaments and host them and could do it safely. So within that period of like four years, it’s really blown up.”

Welch said the biggest event so far was in August 2022, when the BMW Championship pro golf tournament was held at Wilmington Country Club. That event, the first PGA tour event ever in Delaware, drew about 125,000 visitors during a weeklong period to the Wilmington area and had a $30 million economic impact, Welch said.

The steady draws, however, are the tourneys that attract teams from Eastern states and sometimes farther away. And when kids or adults come, they need places to sleep, eat, shop and be entertained.

“Not only are they paying for the tournaments and the hotel rooms, they’re paying at restaurants to get meals, or they’re shopping at our local stores and small businesses,” Welch said. “So it’s really this ripple effect that we’re seeing.”

Rob Buccini, the co-founder of developer Buccini Pollin Group, said his firm’s Chase Fieldhouse was built at the edge of Wilmington’s revived Christiana River waterfront, which has hotels, restaurants and the Penn Cinema movie theater.

The facility is also home to the Delaware Blue Coats, the Philadelphia 76ers G League basketball franchise. Besides the youth tournaments, leagues and team training, the Fieldhouse also hosted the NCAA Women’s Atlantic 10 Basketball Championship in 2022 and 2023.

Buccini said the Fieldhouse draws about a half-million unique visitors a year. So when something big is going on there, Buccini said the city and its outskirts benefit in myriad ways.

“You have a massive increase in the pie for the city of Wilmington in terms of weekend demand for the hotels, for the restaurants, for the retailers,’’ Buccini said. “You can talk to any restaurant or any wait staff in the city, and on weekends, which is most weekends, where we have events at the Fieldhouse, there is no question the basketball players will walk in, the volleyball players, the soccer players.”

The state government wants that impact to continue, and that quest spurred these grants, awarded earlier this year:

• $6 million for a new indoor track facility at the Fieldhouse.
• $3 million for DE Turf, located near Frederica, south of Dover, to increase seating capacity from 1,000 to 3,000 and make other improvements.
• $2 million for Midway Motion & Fitness near Rehoboth to build a pickleball complex with 12 indoor courts and four outdoors to meet sanctioning requirements of American Pickleball Association tournaments.
• $300,000 to the STATS Tournaments complex in Bear for one new field for baseball, another for sofball, and for stadium lights at two existing fields.

“This funding will go a long way in ensuring that our state can offer top-notch facilities to teams and event operators for years to come,’’ Welch said.

Another study will likely be done in a few years to measure whether the investments have led to progress and a bigger share of the sports biz pie.

“This does give us a really good benchmark,’’ Welch said. “We’ve a good starting point now, and we can really see how much it grows in the future.”