How Many Professional Sporting Venues Have You Visited?

High school, college, and professional football seasons have arrived, and as many sports enthusiasts gear up to root for their favorite teams, there are some die hard fans who are planning once in a lifetime trips. Whether you are traveling to the nation’s capital to watch a Washington Nationals home game before baseball season ends or you are putting together one of the available PGA travel packages to see your favorite professional golfers, you are not alone. Many Americans love sports and may find themselves especially eager to find a way to take a break from work at the office, a never ending list of home projects, and, perhaps most importantly, the political news of the day.

Sports travel often includes bucket lists like attempting to visit every professional baseball sports diamond in the country or to check off the top event for every kind of sport. In fact, if you are looking for a great gift idea for the biggest sports enthusiast in your family you might consider a poster that has a small black and while diagram of the professional ballfields in the country. These muted images can be gently scratched off to reveal full color photos of the venues once they have been crossed off the list.

Is Attending a Washington Nationals Home Game on Your Bucket List This Year?

With so many sporting venues available, it should come as no surprise that achieving any set of bucket list goals can be a rather expensive endeavor. Working a game into your current travel schedule for work, however, may be one way to more affordably fund the games that you want to see. Sports travel and tour packages are also a way to conveniently, if not necessarily affordably, visit your favorite teams. With venue tours and behind the scene looks at bull pens, batting cages, and other locations, a professionally arranged tour package may be the most fun way to attend a Washington Nationals home game or whichever team you root for year round.

Consider some of these facts and figures about the role that college and professional sporting events play in the leisure time of many fans, as well as the economy of the nation:

• Estimated indicate that the North American sports industry will be worth more than of $74 million by the year 2020.
• Almost 31 million people surveyed indicated that they attended a college sports event in 2017, according to a Statista report.
• The National College Athletics Association (NCAA) generated $820 million in revenue in its 2017 financial year from television and marketing rights fees alone.
• Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia are the only five U.S. cities with all four major sports: the Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League.
• Phoenix, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Miami, Dallas, Boston, New York City, and Minneapolis are the eight additional cities that have all four major sports within their metropolitan areas.

Whether you are going together your whole family involved in a trip to see a Washington Nationals home game and cheer on your favorite pitcher or you are planning a boys only trip to see all four major sports over the course of a year in one of your favorite cities, planning is key. Early ticket purchases and reservations made in advance can help you make the most of any trip that you have planned.

Interestingly enough, only 25 states have professional sports teams so this means that there are folks from many other parts of the country that have to really plan their travel to see their favorite athletes compete. The states that have none of the four major professional sports teams include: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. If you live in one of these states, are you making your plan to make the most of your sports travel adventures? If not, it might be time to work with a sports travel and tour consultant.