Elkhart County sees sports tourism uptick, draws major swim events
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With two intercollegiate swimming competitions coming to town in February and March, Elkhart County is set to experience an economic boost that is a rarity in the winter months.
The Great Lakes Valley Conference (GLVC) Swimming & Diving Championships kicked off earlier this week at the Elkhart Health & Aquatics Center. The event will run through Saturday, bringing close to 1,000 student athletes, coaches, support staff, including family and friends to the area.
“This is our third time hosting the GLVC Swimming and Diving championship at this facility, and it’s truly one of the best swimming venues in the Midwest, if not the country,” GLVC Commissioner Jim Naumovich said. “One of our goals for all of our championships is to provide our student athletes with the best venues that we can find. The Elkhart Health and Aquatics Center certainly meets that; it’s a great facility.”
Naumovich speaks about why the conference chose to come back to Elkhart and factors that influenced that choice.
College athletes from 11 schools across the Midwest will compete for the championship title at Elkhart Health and Aquatics Center, which was built with the help of a grant from the state’s Regional Cities initiative. Along with students from the University of Indianapolis, students from Illinois and Missouri will participate in the swim events.
“It’s a very high level of competition. The GLVC is arguably the top NCAA Division II swim conference in the country. It’s a very high energy, electric atmosphere,” Naumovich said. “We had a couple of swimmers from GLVC schools that represented their countries in the Olympics in Paris that’ll be participating, and others that hope to be Olympic swimmers in the future.”
With athletes, support staff and supporters staying in hotels in and around Elkhart County, patronizing restaurants and touring the sights in the area, the Elkhart County Convention and Visitors Bureau (ECCVB) projects economic impact in the millions of dollars from the six-day event. For comparison, the ECCVB said that a 2023 swim meet with about 1,500 in attendance injected over $1.1 million into the local economy.
“Competitors, coaches and support staff, and family stay at local hotels, eat out at local restaurants, order catering services from local providers, and shop at local stores, bringing revenue to those businesses and helping to pay for the salaries of workers,” ECCVB Director of Communications Terry Mark said. “We have an economic impact calculator that we use. We take the number of people who come in for the event, the number of days they’re here and then generate an estimate on the total economic impact.”
The caliber of the facilities at Elkhart Health & Aquatics, including an indoor stretch 50-meter pool, has contributed heavily to the influx of sports tourism activity, but conferences also choose to come to Elkhart because of the abundance of lodging and feeding options available, officials said.
“It’s a great starting point with the pool, but it’s also very important that we have cooperation from the local hotel properties, that we’re putting our teams in hotels that are safe, clean and in fairly close proximity to the venue at an affordable rate,” Naumovich said. “All of our teams are on pretty tight budgets. We fill up a lot of rooms and we’re here all week.”
Unlike other sports where teams may head home once they lose, Naumovich said that most teams stay for the whole event, even teams that strike out early.
“The hotels are excited, and a couple of local restaurants are going to be catering some functions. This is a good boost,” Mark said. “Tourism-wise, February is a slower time of year for Elkhart County. Businesses are generally excited that they’ll see some traffic from teams, parents and fans.”
Elkhart Health & Aquatics charges organizers a rental fee for these events, and its members also get to see college-level performances. Outside of collegiate sport, Elkhart High School’s swim team uses the aquatic facilities for training.
“Not just the swim team kids, but all their freshmen will be coming into the facility throughout the week,” Elkhart Health & Aquatics Aquatics Director Josh Ptak said. “They get a chance to really come into the facility and get a different exposure to what’s going on with the hopes of maybe increased new member sign-ups or maybe getting more local kids in competitive swim teams, leading to more time in the pool.”
Athletes from Elkhart High School and Elkhart United Club manage concessions within the venue as a way to raise funds for the team. Ptak said that Elkhart Community Schools also has another organization that does coffee and danishes for breakfast concessions.
While Indiana created the Sports and Tourism Bid Fund in 2022 to give out matching grants to Hoosier communities looking to bid and attract sports and tourism events, Mark said Elkhart County had yet to take advantage of the fund.
The Indianapolis Business Journal recently reported that the Indiana Sports Corp., administrators of the fund, had already allocated a majority of the $10 million allocated. Now, lawmakers are making a case for a second $10 million allocation in the current legislative session.
With many different swim events scheduled for now until mid-March, scheduling pool time can easily become a problem, but Ptak said the facility usually collaborates with other partners with competition pools in the area, including the University of Notre Dame.
“The Indiana swimming divisional is the first weekend of March, and we have the NAIA national championships here that weekend,” Ptak said. “Luckily in this case, with the GLVC championships that are this week, it’s the same week as the girls state meet, so there’s no high school competitions going on that’s competing for space.”
As needed, Ptak added that smaller events could be held at Northridge High School, Riley High School, Penn High School or even the Concord Aquatics Center in Elkhart.
“We all work together to make sure that all the events that need to take place still get the chance to take place,” Ptak said. “I’m consistently having conversations with other organizations about what we can do and how we can bring activity into the venue. Not just at the local level, with our local clubs, but at the regional and national level as well.”
With events already scheduled into 2029, Ptak said he wants people to realize that swimming is a big sport in Elkhart.
The GLVC swim competition will be back again next year. In March, Elkhart will welcome the NAIA Swimming and Diving Championships, with Bethel University serving as the host institution until 2026.