How to Host a Successful Sports Event

Large scale sports events are usually managed by professional event companies. But if you are planning a small scale / local event, being a good project manager with good organizational skills is the key to success.

If you want to host a successful sporting event – whether it’s for a school, for charity, for your company / business, or for a local sports club – it’s important to have the right checklist to keep you heading in the right direction with your planning.

Here are some of the key elements you need to host a sports event:

• Venue

The first thing you need to secure if the venue for your event. With sports events, having the right venue is very important. You need to ensure that the sports venue fits all your requirements; enough capacity for attendees, enough room for sporting events and games, and passes all health and safety checks.  There are specialist agencies who can help you with indoor sports structures, marquees, tents or temporary sports halls if you are struggling to find somewhere that ticks all the boxes.

• Catering and hospitality – this covers everything food and drink to how your guests will be greeted at the door. You need to think of the full experience of someone attending your event. Do you need seating? Do you need cordoned areas that are restricted for certain people? Do you need to provide any sort of services for people during the day?
• PR and marketing – whether your event is small scale or large scale, an amount of PR is still required in getting people to your event. Whether it’s invite-only, pay on the door or open to the whole public, it’s important that you understand how much marketing you need to undertake. The cheapest and easiest way is via email marketing or social media but if you need invitations to be sent out in the post, you need to think about copywriting, design and print. 

These are the 3 key areas to think about when hosting a sporting event. Each area needs to be expanded and broken down so that you can form a comprehensive checklist. Once your checklist has been created, you can then start to pull everything together.

For bigger events, it is always recommended to hire an external events agency so that you can focus on other things. But if you are hosting one by yourself, remember the key is to be organised and prepared.