When you consider sports activities tourism, you would possibly take into consideration taking a visit to the Olympics, or perhaps Taylor Swift and crew making the rounds of NFL stadiums these days.

But sports activities tourism is rather more than that. It’s all the things from making a kayak journey to touring with your loved ones to a youngsters’ soccer match.

And it might probably all have an actual affect on the atmosphere.

That’s why Brooke Hansen, an affiliate professor on the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business, is specializing in Sports Tourism and sustainability.

Hansen says this booming business in Florida must be managed — quickly.

“Sports tourism can be traveling to get trained in a different sporting modality. You could be attending a golf camp somewhere. That’s sports tourism. You could also be traveling to go hiking, biking, kayaking, windsurfing. That’s all sports tourism, too. That’s why sports tourism, if you look at it from that lens, accounts for maybe as much as 25% of all tourism, so it is huge. We’re talking billions of dollars and millions of people.

Hansen also discussed other topics, including how the state can manage this growth in light of it’s burgeoning population.

How are we doing by way of managing this within the state of Florida?

We’ve taken it up a couple of notches lately. And Pasco County has dubbed itself the Sports Coast, which is a really intelligent advertising and marketing alternative to advertise skating, scalloping and ecotourism. So it is actually fascinating that Pasco determined to try this. And it has been enormously profitable.

What are the downsides to that big success?

In normal, the downsides to the big success of Florida tourism is its personal success. We have 137 million folks coming to the state of Florida. And there are aspirations to have Florida be the No. 1 vacation spot on the planet. So my query is, all the time, the place are we placing these folks, as a result of many people who reside right here, we will not get to locations like seashores due to the site visitors, due to the overcrowding. So we actually want to maneuver extra right into a mode of vacation spot administration.

In my experiences, say kayaking and such, you go to Crystal River, you go to Weeki Wachee. Those locations are careworn.

Our Florida springs are superb. We can not ship everybody there with no plan. And Hawaii, they’ve capacities now. Once a park or web site reaches a number of 100 folks, it is now closed and you may’t go in till folks come out. This has been happening in Costa Rica eternally. If you go go to the Monteverde Cloud Forest, which may be very fashionable, they solely permit about 250 folks per day,

Who’s answerable for caring for that administration? Is it locals, county, state? Who’s doing something alongside these strains proper now?

In different components of the world, we now have ministries of tourism that work with ministries of atmosphere, and try this very factor. We do not have a ministry of tourism. So who’s answerable for tourism in our state? I’m the sustainable tourism specialist, serving to everybody perceive how we will remodel the biggest business on the planet to sustainability. And that is how we will have a worldwide affect. So that is my ardour. And that is how I wound up on the sustainability committee for Super Bowl 55 once we had it right here in Tampa; our recycling program for Super Bowl 55 was superb. We had been capable of take loads of the products, even scraps of carpet and issues like that, and donate them to nonprofit organizations. And I do know we’re constructing a brand new stadium at USF. And I’m biding my time somewhat bit earlier than I begin poking my nostril into that and ensuring we’re constructing a LEED-certified stadium. And I’m quickly to select up a telephone and begin pestering folks to be sure that we’re making a sustainability assertion with our new stadium.