Tournament winner? The Fort Smith regional economy

A volleyball tournament is just a bunch of players hitting a ball back and forth across a net, right? Wrong. It’s business. Good business.

Try about $2 million in business. Better yet, try about $2.49 million for the Fort Smith/Van Buren region that comes from clean tourism dollars — “clean” meaning that tourists do nothing but take pictures and leave money.

FORT BATTLE
This particular volleyball tournament hitting Fort Smith is the Battle of the Fort, and it will bring 156 teams (not counting 18 teams from the Fort Smith area) to the Fort Smith/Van Buren area during the weekends of Feb. 7-8, and Feb. 21-22.

James Collins (left), is the director of the local Junior Olympics Volleyball group, which is part of a national volleyball program that sanctions regional volleyball tournaments around the country. The Fort Smith area program began in 1984, and how has 18 teams with about 170 girls ages 10 to 18.

The local Junior Olympics association hosts the regional tournament.

Volleyball, Collins was quick to note, is the second largest sport in the world behind soccer, and the third largest high school sport behind football and basketball.

Area facilities hosting the tournament are the Fort Smith Convention Center, Southside High School Gymnasium, the new high school gym in Van Buren, and the gym at Coleman Junior High School in Van Buren. (Link here for details about the tournament.)

ECONOMIC SPIKE
While tournament officials are keeping score of the games, city officials will keep economic score. The early numbers on the economic score look like this:

• 156 teams, with no less than 8 players per team, equals 1,248 volleyball players

• It is estimated that each player is accompanied by 2.5 people, meaning at least 3,120 people will hit the area over the two weekends; people who are using hotel rooms, eating in restaurants and shopping in local stores. This does not include the volunteers, coaches, referees and college scouts who come to analyze the talent.

“Last year, (a major national restaurant franchise operating in Fort Smith) told us that their sales for the Saturday night was $10,000, the most ever since they have been there,” Collins said.

• The Fort Smith Convention & Visitors Bureau estimates a daily expense of $200 (hotel room, food, shopping, fuel, etc.) for each person attending an area sports tournament.

• Based on the $200 estimate, The City Wire calculates the direct economic impact to be $1.24 million. Factoring in a conservative rollover (dollars flowing through the local economy) factor of 2, the total economic impact of this two weekend event is $2.49 million. The Fort Smith Convention & Visitors Bureau sets the economic impact at $2 million.

“It’s not just Fort Smith. The other cities are benefiting from this. The hotels are full from Van Buren to Roland,” Collins said.

TOURNAMENT GROWTH
Claude Legris, executive director of the Fort Smith Convention & Visitors Bureau, said the bureau contributed $7,000 to the tournament several years ago to help it rent space at the Fort Smith Convention Center. The bureau usually just helps for a few years, giving an organization a chance to get started.

“But we’ve done this now for them for a number of years, because each year they seem to grow. So each year we continue to help them,” Legris explained.

Grow indeed.

The Battle of the Fort began 10 years ago with just 14 teams and now hosts 176 teams from Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas. That’s an annualized 10-year growth rate of 115.71%.

Collins said the Fort Smith tournament was modeled after the Redlands Rendezvous held annually in Oklahoma City.

“We started this based on their format, but now we are bigger than they are with our tournament this year,” said Collins, who is in his sixth year of directing the event.

SUPPORTING FUTURE GROWTH
If the Fort Smith region is to foster continued growth of tournaments like Battle of the Fort and recruit new sporting events to the area, more facilities are required, Legris said.

Ramona Moon, the bureau’s convention and event sales director, attends several trade shows sponsored by the National Association of Sports Commissions. At these shows, she gets 15-minute appointments with various tournament schedulers with events she thinks the Fort Smith area could handle.

“With more facilities, she could make more appointments. More facilities would open up her possibilities to bring new events to the city,” Legris said.

The Fort Smith Classic, which has brought more than 60,000 visitors to the Fort Smith area in the past 11 years, and the “All-Sport Express Cup,” a regional soccer tournament that will bring more than 80 teams to the Fort Smith area March 7-8, are just a few examples of other sporting events whose continued growth and success depend on how Fort Smith business and civic leaders respond to the need for more and better facilities.

Legris said he knows of some communities that empty warehouses at the time of the tournament so they can get them in.

“This is real money we’re talking about. People in other towns will do whatever it takes to get them (regional sporting tournaments),” Legris explained.

Continuing, Legris noted, “Thankfully, the (Battle of the Fort) is so well run here, that people who come here to play often overlook the fact that the venues aren’t all in one tight location that you might find in other locations. … The key thing to remember about keeping it (Battle of the Fort) here is that these are dollars that would be going to Oklahoma City, or Little Rock or Dallas or Memphis. Instead, they are coming to Fort Smith.”

Collins said hundreds of volunteers help make the tournament a success, but he especially credited Mary Alexander, Jennifer Douglas and Holly Layes. He said they are lovingly referred to as “The Big Three” (a play on the historical moniker attributed to World War II Allied leaders FDR, Churchill and Stalin) because “they make so much of this happen.”

For Legris and Moon, the tournament is about the financial impact on the city. For Collins, the effort is more about the financial impact on the players and their families. In the past three years alone, 15 Fort Smith area girls involved in Fort Smith Juniors went to college with a volleyball scholarship.

“We’re about giving girls opportunities. That’s it. … It’s about these ladies,” Collins said.

Members of the Fort Smith Juniors pictured with Elvis at a recent tournament in Memphis.