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It was a whirlwind trip to Mississauga March 11. Out Wednesday, writing last week’s newsletter on the plane and back in the city for an evening shift as night editor Thursday. It was exhausting.
Exhausting, but exhilarating.
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You see, the 2025 World Archery Youth Championships, which we held to great fanfare last August in Winnipeg, was named one of three finalists for the Sport Tourism Canada PRESTIGE Awards for events with budgets of $2 million to $10 million.
It was an honour to be sharing the limelight with such events as the PWC Mont Tremblant World Cup women’s grand slalom skiing tournament and the BKT World Men’s Curling Championships, and was a testament to both six years of planning and our hard-working corps of volunteers. We congratulate the winner, PWC Mont Tremblant.
I wrote about the World Archery Youth Championships in September, but here’s a brief recap: in 2019 at the same event in Madrid, I envisioned Winnipeg as a host city.
With the help of what is now Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism, Archery Canada and Archery Manitoba, we won the bid.
Nearly 500 athletes from 51 countries navigated an Air Canada strike that shut down the airline and disrupted global travel days before the event began. We generated more than $4 million in economic activity and put 3,867 room-nights into city hotel coffers.
Fenna Stallen from the Netherlands and India’s Surya Hamsini Madala face off for the bronze medal in Compound Under-18 Women Aug. 23. Stallen claimed the medal. (World Archery)
In a nutshell, here’s what I learned from running the event.
1. Don’t cheap out: Nobody is going to thank you for making the event more affordable, but they’re certainly going to complain if something isn’t right. There were probably less expensive caterers for athlete lunches than WOW! Catering, but I can’t imagine any would have been better. If you have to take a little less in profit to make it a world-class event, so be it.
2. “Thank you, we’ll take that under advisement.” There are some complaints you can and should deal with. Some are just untenable. Always have a polite response regardless.
3. If you’re responsible for housing and feeding the athletes, as we were given this was a youth event, use banquet hotels. You’ll have to charge more, but the banquet hotels are already geared up to feeding large numbers of people. See tip No. 1.
4. Advertise the event early. You’re not doing this for the sake of attendance, but to get your event into the eyes of potential sponsors. Sponsors will budget by the fiscal year, and if your event isn’t in the budget, you’re not getting the coin.
5. Engage Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism before you even begin. The help this organization provides is invaluable. It will help you choose dates, will send out requests for proposals to the city hotels and help with connections to the city and province. If you need to host a site visit, as we did with World Archery, it will help organize.
6. Hire an event planner early: These people have all the connections. Merchandise, hotels, caterers, transportation. We couldn’t have been as successful as we were without Ree Dion and his firm EventCamp. We also would have avoided the errors hinted at in tip No. 3.
7. Work out technical details specific to your event early. We had to buy 88 target butts and stands and thousands of target faces, had to rent 210 metres by three metres of athlete shelter tents, as well as staging, tables, generators, fencing and scaffolding, and such large orders may require extra time from the manufacturer.
8. Be ruthless in accepting payment: In our world, some countries simply cannot access world financial systems and must pay in cash on arrival. Most countries were very good about meeting their obligations, but if any expect you to look beyond a shortfall, don’t. In our case, teams needed a release letter from me before World Archery would even think about issuing credentials. If you have the power, use it. You’ll need the revenue.
To misquote Mark Twain, world events such as this are fatal to prejudice. Cultural and ethnic differences faded into the smiles of the athletes and the cheering of the parents and coaches. It really was a wonderful event to be a part of.
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