Showing off on the world stage

The World Games 2022 are seen by organizers as a way to boost the city’s image

In just one year, the world will come to the Magic City.

From July 7-17, 2022, Birmingham will play host to The World Games, a major international sports competition affiliated with the Olympics.

The city will welcome about 3,600 athletes from more than 100 countries. Those athletes will compete in 32 sports at over a dozen venues around the metropolitan area.

There will be about 100,000 attendees.

It will take a lot of planning, logistics and people, including about 2,500 volunteers, to execute The Games — by far the biggest thing this city has ever hosted.

The Games are “as important an event as any that has ever occurred in Birmingham,” said Jay Kasten, vice president of operations for The World Games 2022.

In return, the event should give the Birmingham area an economic boost worth about $256 million, officials say.

However, that is perhaps not the most important long-term benefit to hosting the event.

It’s a chance for Birmingham to remake its image, which was badly tarnished by racial strife in the 1950s and 1960s.

“We have a great opportunity to show off Birmingham’s growth and vibrancy to the world,” Kasten said.

At a deeper level, it may also be a chance for the city to shed its long-standing inferiority complex.

“Just like in any relationship, it is hard to get someone to love you if you don’t love yourself, and I think Birmingham is finally getting comfortable in our own skin,” said Nick Sellers, CEO of The World Games 2022 Birmingham.

For decades, Birmingham has tried to chase Atlanta, Nashville and Charlotte, he said.

“Now we’re realizing that there is no better place to be,” Sellers said. “We love our city, and people who come here are starting to recognize that. It’s like the magic is coming back to the Magic City. I can’t wait to showcase it to the world.”

That process will begin in earnest with the global ticket launch for The Games on July 7.

As organizers prepared for that event, Sellers, Kasten and other officials with The Games talked to Iron City Ink about the positive impact they believe the event will have on Birmingham.

Mixing old and new

In addition to their size and scale, The Games are unique, organizers say, and offer an intriguing mix of traditional events with newer, cutting-edge competitions.

“There are some sports that people know,” Sellers said. Examples include softball, gymnastics, lacrosse and bowling.

But there are also a wide variety of newer or more unusual events, such as dance sport, parkour, drone racing, fistball and tug of war.

The Birmingham Organizing Committee is billing TWG2022 as the “next generation of sports,” Sellers said,

The Games in Birmingham will also be the first major sporting event to have competitions for the disabled, such as wheelchair rugby, on the official program, Sellers said.

“I want this to turn into a FOMO moment,” Sellers said. “I want it to be like Birmingham’s Woodstock where young folks are saying, ‘Whether I care about music or sports or not, I am going to be in Birmingham in July 2022, because everybody’s going to be there.’”

Feeling good so far

Sellers said he feels good about the pace of planning and preparation so far.

He praises the cooperation the organizing committee has from the city of Birmingham, Jefferson County, the state of Alabama and other governmental entities.

The Games also recently announced a partnership with the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

He said there have been “some silver linings in the postponement that we had to go through.”

He is referring to the fact that the global COVID-19 pandemic forced the delay of the Tokyo Olympics from July 2020 to July 2021. In turn, that forced organizers to push the Birmingham event from July 2021 to July 2022.

The Games have had time to attract more sponsors, with about 40 major corporate sponsors signed on at press time, Sellers said. “We still have some opportunities and a ways to go to hit our mark, but we are close,” he said.

The Games will also take advantage of some “brand-new facilities” that would not have been ready by 2021, Sellers said.

He cites Protective Stadium and the newly renovated Legacy Arena at the located near the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex, as well as the City Walk linear park being constructed underneath the new Interstate 59/20 Freeway bridge downtown.

The delay “has been a blessing in disguise,” said Jonathan Porter, chair of the board of directors for TWG2022 and senior vice president of customer operations for Alabama Power.

In addition to more venues coming online, the delay allowed the organizers to “add excellent staff with expertise in areas to continue to strengthen our planning and preparation,” Porter said.

Good venues

The venues for The Games announced so far include Legion Field, Boutwell Auditorium, Protective Stadium, The Hoover Met and Oak Mountain State Park.

“I think the entire community will be pleasantly surprised at the caliber of the venues and what we’ve done to give them the look and feel of The World Games,” Sellers said.

“Our venues are of the highest quality,” Kasten said.

Kasten wants to ensure that fans have a good experience while attending the games.

He cited such factors as a “seamless” ticket-buying process, clear directional assets and signage, parking availability, park and ride options where necessary and smooth traffic flows when leaving venues.

“These are the first and last impressions patrons will have of TWG2022,” Kasten said.

Unlike previous World Games cities, Birmingham’s venues have the asset of proximity, Kasten said. “All of our venues are within 30 minutes of our city center.”

Organizers are attempting to take advantage of the closeness of some of the venues to create an “atmospheric connection,” said Kathy Boswell, a Birmingham native with more than 20 years of experience in community relations who serves as the vice president of community engagement for TWG2022.

As an example. Boswell cited Protective Stadium, the BJCC and City Walk.

“With these venues being together, they will create an atmosphere filled with energy, excitement and engagement over the 11-day event,” she said.

“We are intentionally planning for people to have the opportunity to connect through music, laughter, meeting the athletes, food, walking access to several of the sporting events and the opportunity to purchase products from local vendors,” Boswell said.

Sellers seems confident that attendance will be strong, especially given the fact that The Games will be the first major international sporting event with full-capacity venues to occur since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There is so much pent-up demand for people to get together again,” Sellers said.

“We will have full venues,” he said.

Sellers said that he looks forward to the opening and closing ceremonies, which he said he thinks will be “an unbelievable experience” that will have “the quality of a Super Bowl halftime show.”

The opening ceremony, for example, which will feature such honorary event co-chairs as Charles Barkley, Vonetta Flowers and Noah Galloway, “will be such an unbelievable moment for our city and state,” Sellers said.

After Tokyo

The public profile of The Games will pick up considerably after the Tokyo Olympics, Sellers said.

Organizers will begin the “Road to Birmingham” announcements to announce the global qualifiers for all of the sports competitions.

They will also begin the effort to identify the athletes in the games who can become stars.

“We will have our own Simone Biles and Michael Phelps,” Sellers said. “We will design promotions around a handful of special athletes.”

In addition, the ticket launch in July will provide organizers with “a lot of data on venue attendance, where patrons are coming from” and more, Kasten said.

Some of the most “critical” goals for organizers the next few months will include “continued fundraising … procurement of equipment and ongoing marketing and community awareness” of the event, Porter said.

Embracing the future

The World Games could be a major international coming-out party for Birmingham, officials say.

Kasten, who is not a Birmingham native, is excited about showing off the city. “I moved to Birmingham for work in 2008 knowing little to nothing about the city,” he said.

“But after living here for 10 plus years, I’m proud to call Birmingham my home and promote it anywhere I go,” he said.

“Not only from an economic development standpoint but from a branding standpoint. Birmingham will be seen and viewed as the new and vibrant Birmingham that is a diverse, innovative, and forward-looking city,” Porter said. “The Games will provide an opportunity to continue to be seen as a new Birmingham and not the Birmingham of the 60s.”

According to Boswell, “the biggest impact” of hosting The Games is that “it is forcing so many entities to see we need each other and we have to work together.”

In her work boosting community involvement in The Games, Boswell said she has seen people from dozens of groups — city governments, corporations, small businesses, community groups, universities and everyday people — contributing their time and talents to the cause.

“It is taking us all coming together as one,” Boswell said. “We are coming together to host this once-in-a-lifetime moment for this city and state. The mindset and belief in we are one is what will help us leverage The World Games for more opportunities in the future.”

“We want to use The World Games as a tool to have people reimagine Birmingham and hopefully bring more jobs and opportunity here,” Sellers said.

Doing big things

While he is pleased with the state of preparation for The Games so far, Sellers said it’s important the city got two major pieces right: security and safety for visitors and transportation.

The transportation piece includes public transit, park and rides and shuttle services, he said.

“We want to make it easy and safe to navigate the games,” Sellers said.

And the stakes are high.

“If we get this right, this is a huge audition for other mega-events,” Sellers said. “I see that as a huge opportunity for us to be seen as a big event town.

“This is our audition for the world to show that we can do mega international events,” he said.

“I can’t imagine the enduring legacy that it will mean for Birmingham, that we have the confidence, the self-confidence that we can do big things. That’s what this moment is about.”

All the details

For more information about The World Games 2022, call 205-846-2500 or go to twg2022.com.

Those interested in volunteering can sign up at twg2022.com/volunteers.

When the volunteer program launches Sept. 30, they will be notified to complete the volunteer application.