NAIA tourney spurs surge of sporting events in Sioux City

His targets sometimes know little to nothing about Sioux City, but they do know what the NAIA is. And they know that if a major collegiate athletic association has been holding a tournament here for so long, Sioux City must be doing something right.

“That speaks volumes for other clubs, for other tournament organizers. It gives people confidence that Sioux City can host a big event,” said Cooper, executive director of Arena Sports Academy in Sioux City.

When it was first held in Sioux City in 1998, the NAIA tournament was in a class of its own on the city’s athletic calendar. The city has not hosted any other event of comparable size, attracting 32 teams (since reduced to 16) and their fans from across the country, and filling local hotels and restaurants.

As the tournament prepares to kick off in Sioux City for the 26th time on Monday, it could be argued that it’s not even the city’s biggest event anymore. Each weekend, it’s common to have as many as 200 youth basketball or volleyball teams in town for tournaments that fill slots at two new athletic academies, the city’s new convention center near downtown, and local high schools and Bring thousands of dollars in revenue to hotels, restaurants and other businesses.

The youth sports boom was probably inevitable. But the experience Sioux City sports organizers have gained from years of hosting the NAIA basketball tournament has undoubtedly made it easier for Cooper and his contemporaries at the United Sports Academy in North Sioux City to launch their programs and carry dozens of competitions to Sioux to bring to town.

“This event probably paved the way for us to be able to host some of these bigger tournaments,” said Jay Wolfe, United Sports Academy facilities manager. “I think it just shows that this is a place where people can come and have a successful event.”

Prior to the NAIA basketball tournament, Sioux City hosted major events from time to time: NAIA national championships in baseball and golf, and on a few occasions the International Men’s Softball Congress World Fastpitch Tournament. The Sioux City Musketeers hockey team and the Sioux City Explorers baseball team each had a fan base, but the city’s sports calendar was largely devoid of major events that drew crowds to the city.

“Sioux City was probably best known as a high school sports town. The city had never really taken on an event of national importance,” said Corey Westra, director of the NAIA basketball tournament since 2007.

Signing the 1998 tournament was a big deal, and local organizers pulled out all the stops, assembling sponsors and dozens of volunteers to shower the teams and their fans with hospitality. Sioux City welcomed the tournament like few cities, drawing enthusiastic crowds first to the old Sioux City Auditorium and since 2004 to the newer, larger Tyson Events Center.

NAIA executives obviously liked what they saw, consistently awarding the tournament to Sioux City and bringing the 2008 NAIA Volleyball Championship Tournament here. This tournament, which takes place every year in December, no longer existed either.

Nationwide, people in the sports industry were beginning to take notice. In 2009, SportsTravel magazine named Sioux City a Top Sports Destination, in part because of the organizational skills displayed in hosting the NAIA tournaments each year.

The conditions for the start of the growing circle of youth sports tournaments were created. After years of traveling to Sioux Falls, Omaha and beyond to compete, local youth sports organizations, players and parents were tired of having to leave town to compete.

“People started realizing that you have to go to Sioux Falls all the time, why not bring people here?” Wolfe said.

The United Sports Academy opened four years ago; Arena Sports Academy months later. One or both started programs and club teams in volleyball, basketball, soccer and dance, as well as individual training in other sports. Its opening, along with the Siouxland Expo Center (now Seaboard Triumph Foods Expo Center), which opened in 2020, added dozens of spaces that the metro area had been missing to host major youth tournaments.

It wasn’t long before athletic academies began attracting tournaments that brought dozens, sometimes hundreds, of teams from Arizona and Montana to Sioux City for three days each. Today, about 40 weekends a year, tournaments are held in one sport or another, or sometimes more than one.

“More than that, it’s just another weekend here, hotels packed and parking lots packed,” Cooper said.

Seemingly overnight, Sioux City became a regular fixture on many national and regional tournament circuits.

With the rise of youth sports culture and the roughly simultaneous opening of two athletic academies, it’s inevitable, Cooper said. But without the city’s history of hosting NAIA tournaments, it might have taken longer to attract some of those youth tournaments.

“Do I think it would have achieved success that quickly? Absolutely not,” Cooper said.

To illustrate the impact of NAIA tournaments, Westra, an NAIA volleyball coach who was also a major player on the national youth club volleyball scene, said Westra approached him a year during the NAIA tournament. Impressed with Sioux City’s ability to host the national tournament, the coach told Westra that he would bring one of his youth tournaments here.

“He said, ‘I know Sioux City can support that because they have the hotels, the restaurants and the people,'” Westra said.

Through years of NAIA tournaments, a group of people and organizations have become familiar with the logistics required to run a major tournament. This knowledge continues to branch out.

“There’s still a relationship where the success of one led to the success of the other,” Westra said.

The result: weekends when local sports facilities and hotels are full. Westra pointed to a recent weekend that featured a major youth basketball tournament at the academies, a cheerleading tournament at the Tyson Events Center, the Great Plains Athletic Conference college wrestling tournament at the Long Lines Family Rec Center, and a high school basketball division -Girls took place at the Tyson.

This weekend, the Heartland State Championship basketball tournament, hosted by a national organization, draws more than 100 teams from across the Midwest to Sioux City. It is the fourth year in a row that the tournament has been held here.

“Once people come here and meet people, they see how committed we are and who we are,” said Cooper, a Sioux City native.

This ability to handle a big event helps his hometown gain notoriety as a sports city, a reputation dating back to the inaugural NAIA women’s basketball tournament in 1998.

“There will come a time when there will be a tournament in town every weekend,” Cooper said.

It’s a development that organizers of NAIA tournaments could never have imagined 26 years ago.

“If you asked me in 1998 and said this was all going to happen in 2023,” Westra said, “I would have told you you were crazy.”