Professional sports have had a tremendous impact on Nevada in a short time. The industry has shifted the economy, created thousands of jobs and enhanced tourism, not to mention the impact to the community at large. In essence, Nevada has leveled up. Once known as simply the entertainment capital of the world, the Silver State can now proudly add sport’s capital of the world to its accolades.
Recently, a group of sports professionals met at a roundtable sponsored by Nevada State Bank. Connie Brennan, publisher and CEO of Nevada Business Magazine, served as moderator for the event. These monthly roundtables bring together different industries to discuss issues and solutions.
What Impact Does Sports Have On the Community in Nevada?
Erick Harper: We had an economic impact study done with UNLV Athletics a few years ago. It was a spend impact for 2021-2022 of $109 million with just UNLV Athletics and we had an outside group do it. In essence, it said that UNLV Athletics supported a little over 1,300 jobs, and that was before we had two good years in football.
Steve Hill: If you look at the jobs that are the most plentiful in sports, they are concessionaires and parking, those are the big blocks of jobs. The growth in sports in Nevada has helped turn those from temporary employment opportunities to full-time ones. If you work at T-Mobile now, you can have a full-time job at just T-Mobile. And with all the different venues, people can float from venue to venue and have a 40-hour week, where 15 years ago, it was hard to find permanent work in sports.
Harper: As crazy as our business is, it continues to excite me to have the opportunity to develop the workforce of Nevada and across the country. Anytime we can have our logos blasted all over the country, we can brand the institution, brand the city of Las Vegas, brand the state of Nevada, and have an opportunity to showcase how wonderful it is to be in this state.
Paul Woody: Sports plays a part in our lives that is unquantifiable. We get to go into these arenas that people save money [to be in] and we get paid to do it. That is an important part of sports and entertainment. There are 40 million people that make their living on the back of rodeo and ranching. I am literally a representative of a way of life, and that is an important and weighty responsibility. We all have jobs because people want to feel a part of that emotional connection with sports.
Ben Joffe: We have eight, nine and 10 year olds who are playing our flagged championships over at Lee’s Family Forum. There are nine-year olds playing in a stadium. That is an experience for our community that raises it up. Every bit of the professional sports and college sports that we get to work with [boosts] that.
Woody: What all of us who are business leaders forget is, we are sometimes a distraction for people’s hardships. Sports is about the feeling. It is about what we can create in a community. I wrote my dissertation on the social impact of sports. People have done hundreds of economic impacts on sports, but the social impact that we can have on a city and a region is leaps and bounds more important than the economic impact.
Are There Expansion and Growth Concerns in This Industry?
Hill: Growth in the community has enabled, particularly some of the bigger sports, to happen. Twenty years ago, we were not a big enough community to support a media market that a professional franchise could be in. The growth in Nevada is an opportunity, it just has to be managed correctly.
Nikki Fargas: We are growing rapidly as a league, but the question is – how do we sustain this momentum? All the professional sports teams that are in Las Vegas need to make sure that we can handle this rapid expansion. We need to make sure that our city’s infrastructure, from housing, transportation and workforce, can handle the rapid growth of Las Vegas.
Kerry Bubolz: I worry about the economic diversity of our community not evolving fast enough to keep pace with the growth of the sports industry. We have to diversify the economy in the Vegas Valley to not be so reliant on entertainment and gaming. I don’t see the pace of that happening as fast as I would like. It seems like, too often, we are still losing out to markets in Arizona and in Texas. We have to find a way to change that dynamic.
Shawn McIntosh: The growth in Nevada is a huge opportunity for us. We have an opportunity to fill a gap that potentially other teams at a major league level can’t. One of our big focuses is being highly accessible and in a market that is becoming less and less accessible because of the rising costs, that is a challenge.
Joffe: Our biggest challenge is making sure we have enough space for our local community that continues to grow. That includes the Monday through Friday practices for kids in football, baseball, basketball and volleyball, and the Saturday spaces that are open for families to see their kids’ games. Our continued growth as a community is amazing but our demand is outpacing what we can accommodate right now. Sports is such a healthy outlet for kids in so many ways and we want to make sure that we can provide a safe and steady outlet for our continued growth within our community.
Is Lack of Funding an Issue?
Stephanie Rempe: When I think of the greatest challenge, it always seems to come down to resources. It is an absolutely ridiculous time in our profession right now. Everything always leads back to money. It is no different today than other times. It just feels more significant.
Hill: The economic headwinds that we have are going to affect all of us. The wind may change this afternoon or next week, but it is going to cause some turmoil over the next number of months and years. We are all going to have to respond to that.
Harper: The challenge is the changing landscape of college athletics right now. It seems like everything that changes has a dollar sign behind it, in front of it, on top of it and below it. And the economic uncertainty of the times that we are going through, from revenue sharing with college athletes, to scholarship limits, has zero clarity at this point.
Stefanie Coleman: We were approved for a student athletic fee but purposefully did not run the program on that fee. I count on my advancement team to go into the community and bring resources to the program. And we have got some very nice support. Individuals have stepped up and said, yes, we want to support this launch.
Rempe: Where we fit in the ecosystem of college athletics is really challenging because there are approximately 380 Division One schools, but there are 134 that play FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) football. Of those 134, there are 68 that have $200 million plus budgets, and we are not even in that hemisphere. And the divide continues to get more and more significant. So the questions are, how we manage that, how we fit where we are, how we support our student athletes and our coaches, and have reasonable expectations? At the same time, we want to compete. That is why we got in this.
Bubolz: The piece that gets to be a concern is our cost of doing business, which is reliant on local revenue streams. The vast majority of every dollar we bring in comes locally. It does not come from massive national television contracts like the NBA (National Basketball Association) or the National Football League. For example, our salary cap is $88.5 million. Next year, it is going to $95 million. It is already on record. The following year, it is going to $105 million and the following year to $113 million. That is just payroll. How do we close that gap? We have to find $20 million over the next three years in additional local revenue. As an organization we have done a great job of stretching the market in terms of what we charge for our product. But at what point is it too expensive? I worry about that.
Are Fans Loyal?
Joffe: Winning is a factor. Everybody wants to support a winner. It is a lot easier to sell tickets when your team is winning. But the fan experience is also what saves fan loyalty. Nobody is going to win every game. There is going to be a little bit of an up and down. But if you maintain that fan loyalty with a great experience every time, whether you win 10-0 or lose 10-0, that is what matters.
Yvonne Wade: I have been here a long time and seen the growth of the city with all the additional sports. There was a time when fans had a choice. They could either go to a UNLV game or Cirque du Soleil show. If we were losing, then we were no longer fancy anymore. Winning matters. We have championship teams here that have absorbed the people that are here. We have absorbed that family spirit, that team unity and that city vibe that makes people invest in us as a sports destination. We are at that point now that win or lose, those fans will stay sometimes. Back in the day, that was not the case. But because we are bringing such energy to the city and have had championships and are winning now on the collegiate level as well, people are engaged and investing.
Fargas: We have led the league in attendance. This is our second consecutive season of selling out our season ticket membership base, which is 8,500, and we did it with our engagement in the community. Every speaking engagement, every community engagement, we were there because we had to build brand awareness. And the entertainment factor is important. The court part is important. Our players are going to entertain you. But another driving force for us has been social media. We have a lot of personalities. People support people. The more we gave them access to our players and coaching staff, it felt as though they were going to return and come to us. But we also have to meet them where they were at. We have seen great results doing that, not just in attendance, but also in fan engagement and in retention.
McIntosh: The onus is on all of us to earn fan loyalty every single day. And a lot of that goes back to the emotion, the family connection and the experiences with teammates. How do we make sure those are the connectors and that we are holding ourselves accountable to earn fan loyalty? Because it is tough in an economic market where there are options and there are more options in this city than there have ever been.
Has Nevada Arrived as the Sports Capital of the World?
Gabe Mirabelli: In this town, there are so many things to do even outside of sports, but we have set a gold standard as being the sports entertainment capital of the world.
Harper: From a collegiate space, the number of people that call from various different levels to talk about coming to Las Vegas because of the excitement here shows that our city has a lot of appeal to a lot of people around the country at every level.
Joffe: We are a sports town. People are moving here for their kids for sports, too. I have kids that are moving here from LA to play youth football in my league because of what we are doing. Our environment has totally leveled up and then leveled up some more. It is amazing to watch, and we are appreciative.
Woody: There is nothing that is more synonymous with the cowboy way than the lights of Las Vegas. That sounds antithetical, but it is true. People yearn to make it to the bright lights of Las Vegas.
McIntosh: We have seen a lot of success, both on the revenue side and on the sporting side, by planting our flag in Las Vegas. Soccer is such a global, interconnected sport. A lot of the conversations that we are having with players, during our head coaching search, and with corporate partners that are national brands, lean into the fact that we are one of the top four markets globally. When people think about the United States, they think, LA, New York, Miami and Las Vegas. As a second division soccer team, we are rarely positioned because most USL (United Soccer League) markets can’t say that. The fact that we are in Las Vegas is a monumental asset. We don’t close some of the partnership deals that we were able to close without being in Las Vegas. We don’t bring in a head coach who has Italian national team experience, who has played at some of the biggest global clubs in the world, like DC Milan, without being in Las Vegas. For us, it is absolutely an asset, and a testament to this being a sports capital of the world.
Woody: For a cowboy, all year long when you go to any of our arenas, whether it is in Mitchell, South Dakota or Houston, Texas, they are talking about Las Vegas and the culmination of our sport. It was a negotiation to be able to come back here and make this home for another 12 years. That emotional tie with this city is so much more important than the millions of dollars that this city commits to our way of life. That is why we came back.
