After All-Star showcase, what’s left for Indy to host?

While Indianapolis hasn’t yet exited the haze of NBA All-Star Weekend, local sports and tourism officials are already pondering what comes next.

Plenty of big events are on the horizon through the end of the decade, including the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials in June, three NCAA Basketball Final Fours and numerous annual conventions with whom the city has locked in contract extensions in recent years.

But leaders of the Indiana Sports Corp. and Visit Indy hope the All-Star Game—which is broadcast in 60 languages across 200 countries, more than the Super Bowl—will shine a light on the city’s hosting capabilities and attract even more big events. Officials say that’s what happened when the city hosted the Super Bowl in 2012.

“What this event does for us when we’re out pitching and thinking about other events is, it suddenly puts Indianapolis at the forefront of people’s minds,” said Sports Corp. President Patrick Talty. “It helps give us something we can talk about [and] point to, because it’s such a huge global event. It helps us think about those national, international events, and maybe get their attention.”

Throughout All-Star Weekend, the Sports Corp. and its counterparts at Visit Indy will welcome numerous businesses and prospective clients to take in the arts, culture and athleticism on display throughout downtown. Separately, the Indiana Economic Development Corp. will bring in site selectors in hopes of scoring business wins.

It’s a tried-and-true strategy the city has employed effectively during other big sporting events, including the 2021 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament and the 2022 College Football Playoff National Championship.

John David, CEO of the Cincinnati-based Sports Events & Tourism Association, said Indianapolis is in prime position to use the event as a springboard in conversations for not just sporting events but major conventions and economic development opportunities as well.

He said All-Star and upcoming events like the swim trials and the Taylor Swift concerts in November raise Indianapolis’ hosting profile because they garner interest from global audiences, much like the 1987 Pan Am Games that helped launch Indianapolis as a sports host city.

Likewise, the All-Star event also gives Indianapolis a prime opportunity to showcase the $400 million in improvements—paid for mostly with tax dollars generated by events at downtown venues—made to Gainbridge Fieldhouse.

“There’s no doubt that any time you have an event of great magnitude, it’s going to impact somebody who may not have thought of [Indianapolis] as a destination for them—that always happens,” David said.

The city isn’t expected to go after a Super Bowl again for quite some time, with observers and insiders saying such a move would likely come in conjunction with eventual upgrades to Lucas Oil Stadium. The league has also generally settled on an informal rotation of venues for the event, showing little interest in venturing back to Midwestern markets due to weather concerns.

Indianapolis also won’t be back in the NBA All-Star rotation for at least a decade. But it could still go after other league events, such as its draft (if it is ever moved from New York City), the draft Lottery and Combine, both Of which were held in Chicago in 2023, or NBA Con, a three-day convention intended to attract basketball fans from across the globe. The first NBA Con, held in Las Vegas last summer, drew 50,000 attendees.

Talty said that, while most everything is on the table, some marquee events are a “perfect fit” for Indianapolis.

“We’ve made no secret about it: The NFL Draft is something on our list that we think would be very successful here. We’ve put in letters of interest for that, so it’s something we’re staying focused on and examining and watching,” he said. “And obviously WrestleMania is a big property that … we would love. We think Indy would be a great place for that.”

The Sports Corp. also hopes to build on earning the swim trials this year by adding more U.S. National Team Olympic trials to its roster for the 2028 Olympic games in Los Angeles and in years beyond, as well as pursuing events in growing sports like rugby and women’s volleyball.

“We’re trying to determine what those sports are that we should be thinking about, that we should be watching and keeping an eye on,” he said. “I would not say that rugby is a huge sport yet in the United States, but I think it’s growing. It’s something that we’re going to … make sure that we’re not late to the game on when it really takes off.”

Talty and others said Indianapolis could also look to further capitalize on the growth in esports, using its experience hosting the NBA 2K League in 2022 to attract other major tournaments and exhibitions.

As part of the proposed $600 million redevelopment of Circle Centre Mall, Beloit, Wisconsin-based Hendricks Commercial Properties LLC is considering a dedicated 72,000-square-foot esports facility.

Keeping relationships

But as much as the city hopes to secure additional events, Talty said, it doesn’t plan to do so at the expense of long-standing partnerships, such as those with the NFL for its Scouting Combine. The league reupped that event for 2025, despite growing speculation that it could—at least temporarily—move to Atlanta, Los Angeles or north Texas.

Likewise, the city hopes to maintain a grasp on major Big Ten Conference championships, in particular football, along with bringing back the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments after their turns in Minneapolis this year. (Indianapolis didn’t submit bids for the 2024 tournaments due to scheduling conflicts.)

“We can’t always be looking for what’s next, in terms of new,” Talty said. “We also have to be very focused on keeping and retaining the [events] that have been here and the ones that are going to be coming back.”

Indianapolis has a rather full dance card, with more than a dozen major sporting events on the calendar through the remainder of the decade and several more expected to be added over the next few years.

Most of those events are in partnership with the Indianapolis-based NCAA, an organization that has essentially controlled college athletics for decades but is starting to face uncertain headwinds because of shakeups in the amateur sports landscape.

Indianapolis hopes to retain its partnership with the NCAA, including hosting future Division I men’s and women’s Final Fours beyond those scheduled through 2029.

The city already has hosted eight men’s basketball championships and three women’s, along with dozens of other collegiate championships and more than 100 other NCAA basketball tournament games. The NCAA moved from Kansas City, Missouri, in 1999 after Indianapolis won an elaborate bid process for the headquarters.

Mark Rosentraub, a professor of sport management at the University of Michigan, said the city’s ability to adjust to the shifting college sports landscape will be key to keeping its eye on the ball, particularly with conferences like the Big Ten, Big East, Horizon League and others that have local ties—either through operations or individual schools—trying to position themselves as power players. And the most lucrative sports are expected to gain strength through non-NCAA television deals.

That has already happened to an extent with Division I football through the College Football Playoff, which operates outside the NCAA’s confines. In basketball, some top conferences—like the Big 12, Big East and Big Ten—are partnering on an alternative to the second-tier National Invitational Tournament through a deal with Fox Sports.

That partnership, which has not been finalized, would require the top 16 teams in those conferences that did not reach the 68-team NCAA tournament to travel to Las Vegas for a tournament broadcast on Fox’s networks. Indianapolis in April is set to host the semifinals and finals of the NCAA-owned NIT and Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament at Hinkle Fieldhouse.

“Because it is a big player in hosting events, Indianapolis now has to figure out its strategy of how it functions in the new world,” Rosentraub said. “There will be NCAA events, but dealing with football, and men’s and women’s basketball now is going to require a different strategy because of the conference shakeups.”

A single-sport focus

Milt Thompson, a local attorney at Bleeke Dillon Crandall and CEO of Grand Slam Sports, said Indianapolis has likely “reached its ceiling” on the size of events it can host. But he said the events the city is considering going after fall well within its capabilities. He also said Indianapolis’ ceiling is much higher than that of most cities its size—or even larger.

“What’s bigger than a Super Bowl or the Indianapolis 500?” he said. “What’s bigger than national championships in basketball and football. What’s bigger? What ceiling do we need to shoot for? Because we do these events bigger and better than anyone.”

He said Indianapolis is smart to focus on U.S. Olympic trials, because those events attract tens of thousands of spectators, and—like a Super Bowl, national championship or All-Star Game—they put a city on center stage.

But, Thompson added, it’s unlikely Indianapolis will ever host another Pan Am Games or a make a full-throated Olympic bid—either individually or in collaboration with other cities—because of the complexities of hosting such large weeks-long events, including hotel space. Hosting an Olympics would also require finding other parts of the state that could host events that can’t be accommodated on local terrain, such as surfing or yachting in a summer games and skiing in the winter.

Additionally, Thompson said, there’s been an unwritten agreement that the city would focus on single-sport championships.

“After the Pan Am Games, we declared as a group that we’re going to go for single world championships—no more multi-sport events, because they’re just too strenuous, too difficult to pull off and not economically viable,” he said. “We’re not really equipped” for that.

David, with the sports tourism group, said Indianapolis could succeed from a strategizing perspective at hosting an Olympics or other multi-sport event. But he agreed with Thompson that the city doesn’t have the capacity.

“When you start looking at multi-sport events, [facilities] would be the only limiting factors,” he said. “It’s not a capability thing, and it’s not a strategic thing. The only issue Indianapolis would have to eliminate to do that in the future is the potential facility issues.”

Susan Baughman was president of the 2022 College Football Playoff Host Committee and has been with the Indiana Sports Corp. since 1996. She also was director of events for USA Gymnastics from 1991 to 1996. She said she sees opportunities for the return of a sports festival to Indianapolis, similar to the one it hosted in 1982 (although that particular event is defunct).

“There might be something out there that is a mixed event, that has not just one sport, but is more festival-style or has different sports within it,” she said. “I also think the scope of what is required by and of these events changes over time. As they become more publicized, there’s a lot more complexity in hosting.”

Tourism tactics

Indianapolis also has its eye on avenues besides sports to draw tourists.

Chris Gahl, executive vice president for Visit Indy, said the city is placing a larger emphasis on securing medical-related meetings but also hopes to make Indianapolis a business-tourism city.

He said Visit Indy “wants to be aggressive in the corporate world” by encouraging companies based here to bring clients to Indianapolis as well as to help woo other national and international businesses to the city for their events.

“Business travel is a missing piece of our portfolio … and we’ve traditionally not done [it] well,” he said. “So, we’re going to make a concerted effort with the companies based in Indianapolis to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to not only invite them to host their meetings and influence meetings to [be held in] Indianapolis but also encourage business travel to the city.”

He said hotels in the pipeline, such as the Aloft and InterContinental hotels on Market Street set to open this year and the Signia by Hilton on Pan Am Plaza that should open in 2026, will bolster the city’s case for more business traffic. Those hotels will also help Indianapolis keep conventions like FDIC International and Gen Con through 2028 and 2030, respectively.

The Signia and the associated expansion of the Indiana Convention Center will also allow the city to bring in events that haven’t looked at Indianapolis before. The expansion helped secure both the American Dental Association for 2026 and the 2035 Alcoholics Anonymous gathering.

It will also allow two citywide conventions to happen at the same time by splitting the convention center into a north and south campus.•