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The Group Travel Leader Going on Faith Select Traveler

Sports stars


Courtesy Edmond CVB

For 26 years, Lancaster, Pa., has been the site of one of the largest soccer tournaments on the East Coast, the Hempfield Fall Classic. Held the weekend before Thanksgiving, the tournament is expected to have an attendance of 25,000 this year.

Another longtime area soccer tourney is the Red Rose Classic, in its 23rd year. There are also a number of new tournaments, in their third and fourth years, including the FC Delco Tournament, which brings 7,000 players to the area on Memorial Day weekend and the Pennsylvania Classics Keystone Cup with 5,500 participants on Labor Day Weekend.

In 2011, Lancaster added another tournament to its resume when Eastern Pennsylvania Youth Soccer was chosen to host the 2011 and 2012 U.S. Youth Soccer Region Championships. In 2011, 264 teams played 450 soccer matches at three venues in the Lancaster area in five days.

It took nearly five years for the Lancaster organizing committee and Eastern Pennsylvania Youth Soccer, partnering with the Pennsylvania Dutch CVB, to win the bid for the region. The tournament had never been held in Eastern Pennsylvania Youth Soccer’s territory.

“For the Lancaster community in general, it’s between $12 to $15 million in tourist dollars coming in,” said Jim Kuntz, a member of the local organizing committee. “With regards to soccer interest, Lancaster County is already a big soccer community. What this tournament will do for the Lancaster community is bring top-notch soccer to the community and will let a lot of folks locally get a good look at top flight in soccer in the region.”

There’s no question that facilities can drive sports events.

Canton, Ohio, is known as the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame but few realize it is also home to two top high-school football stadiums.

Fawcett Stadium, next door to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, can seat 22,000 fans, has a professional -style press box, artificial turf and a video board. ESPN has called it the No. 1 high school football stadium in the country.

That notoriety has led to its use for high-profile games, including the International Federation of American Football Junior World Championships, played there in 2009. It was the IFAF championship’s first time in the United States.

Seven miles from Fawcett is the No. 10 top high school football stadium in the country, Paul Brown Tiger Stadium. Nearly as large as Fawcett, with 18,000 seats, it too has artificial turf, a quality press box and video board.

For the past 22 years, the two stadiums have been the site of the Ohio High School Athletic Association’s state football championships.

The McDonald’s Kirk Herbstreit Football Challenge and many other tournaments and football camps also use the stadiums.

Like Canton, Hastings, Neb., is home to a sports hall of fame, in this case, the Nebraska Softball Hall of Fame, part of the Bill Smith Softball Complex.

Each year, the Smith complex, owned and managed by the Nebraska Amateur Softball Association, draws thousands of softball players and fans to this city of 24,000, off Interstate 80, 107 miles west of Lincoln, Neb.

From spring through the fall, tournaments are  played at the seven-field complex nearly every weekend.

Nine national tournaments and hundreds of state tournaments have been held there since the complex was built in 1995, and this year, another national tourney, the Men’s Slow Pitch Softball Class D Northern Nationals, is headed its way.

The sport’s impact is not lost on the Adams County CVB in Hastings, which often supplies funding to help plan and promote new tournaments.