Kingston will have an uphill battle attracting an event like the Brier or the Memorial Cup

As city council prepares to make an historic decision related to Kingston's waterfront and its future, it's useful to consider the possibility of hosting national sporting events in a large venue entertainment centre.

Since about 1985, the idea of hosting sporting events has become popular in Canada. There is intense interest from communities about hosting events in virtually every moderately high-profile sport.

The sport itself, as the "franchise" holder, holds pretty well all the cards. It is up to interested communities to offer the most lucrative and positive set of inducements to get the event. The franchise holder (for example, the Canadian Curling Association) outlines its minimum requirements and then leaves the "add-ons" to those interested in hosting the event.

The best example of a franchise holder being in the driver's seat is the recent awarding of the 2007 Memorial Cup hockey tournament to Vancouver. The franchise holder has been guaranteed a cheque for $1 million at the end of the competition. And that's only one of the benefits and inducements that Vancouver has promised the Western Hockey League.

It is costly to prepare a bid to host an event, to lobby after delivering the bid documents, to prepare materials for marketing the bid elements and to put together a team to convince the members of the franchise who will vote on the site. The costs are not only financial but also human.

A group of citizens who get the idea of hosting a particular event in their community will require a team of 20 to 50 people. Members of this group typically are leaders of the community: some sports people, members of the community's tourism association, members of the sport tourism organization and people active in marketing and promotion. A willingness to work together for the good of the community has to be the common thread.

The franchise holder will spend significant time and energy behind the scenes learning about the dynamics of the community. It will want to learn about the ability of the people in the community to work together, the community's ability to share information, the degree to which "empires" are protected, the ability of the community to amicably sort out inevitable differences that will occur, its reputation, and the perceived assets and liabilities of the community.

This investigation, which always is done quietly, is critical to a franchise holder. It doesn't want its property (that is, the event) to become fodder for local bickering. With so much interest across Canada in hosting high-profile events, any hint of disharmony within a community will be enough for a franchise holder to eliminate that community from the list of potential sites.

In many respects, developing the proposal to deliver to the franchise holder is the most complex, demanding and creative part of the whole process. The group preparing the bid must do the necessary research, acquire the support of various constituencies in the community (for example, a university, the municipality and citizens in general), prepare the documents, make overtures to the provincial and federal governments, etc.

The franchise holder expects that the minimum requirements it has identified will be met, and if not the community will be eliminated in the "pre-qualification" stage. The best recent example of this is the fact that Cuba was eliminated from the 2012 Summer Olympic bidding process early on because it did not meet the minimum requirements for Olympic Games and its plan to do so was unacceptable to the International Olympic Committee. There were other aspects of Cuba's proposed bid that also were unacceptable.

One aspect of a community that is essential to the bid, and must be obvious, is its volunteers. How many have signed up? How quickly did they sign up to help for previous bids? How experienced are they? What kind of infrastructure does the community have to support volunteers? Have there been any recent events that might have floundered due to a lack of willing volunteers? In Kingston's case, for example, published reports that CORK has had difficulty attracting sufficient volunteers would be noted and investigated by a franchise holder.

Let's move beyond meeting the minimum criteria. There also are the inducements, the add-ons, the "frills," the "nice-to-haves" and the amenities. What else can be put into the bid package that will make the proposal stand out from all the other proposals? What exciting, lucrative and distinct enhancements can be offered? It is the amenities or add-ons that win the bid, and amenities cost money. Moreover, it takes experience and creativity to develop a winning enhancement package.

In the case of curling, for example, Regina, which will host the 2006 Brier, has a facility that seats 6,000 people, with excellent sight lines from every seat. The piece-de-resistance is the facility, adjacent to the Agridome, for the Brier Patch. This facility seats 6,000 in a bar-like setting. For curling, much of the money is made in the Brier Patch, an absolutely essential feature of any bid for either the men's or women's national championship (the Brier or Scott Tournament of Hearts). So, in the case of curling, each bidding city must meet the minimum requirements for both the Brier Patch and the sport facility. No city would get beyond first base in the bidding process without a superb Brier Patch attached to, or within a few short steps of, the curling facility.

A critical add-on to any bid is the parking package. Hosts are expected to have sufficient parking close at hand for fans. A site like Credit Union Place in Saskatoon has 3,000 free parking spots. And for the 2000 Brier in Saskatoon, for example, the organizing committee offered a free shuttle bus service within the parking lot. It also offered a free shuttle bus service from city shopping mall parking lots to the venue by dedicated buses using bus lanes.

Every franchise holder selects host cities using generally similar criteria. Each, however, puts a different emphasis on the various criteria. The Canada Games Council, for example, ranks "legacy" as its last of five criteria. The definition of "legacy" varies from one organization to another, so what the International Olympic Committee considers a legacy is quite different from what the Canada Games Council considers a legacy.

Bidding for a sporting event is a cutthroat activity. The recent experience of London's bid for the Shriners Hospital is a good example. Interestingly, the chairperson of the London bid committee also chaired the bid and organizing committee for the 1989 Canada Games, so he was well aware of the politics of bidding for such a high-profile and important facility.

In any bid that comes from Kingston, the enhancements will have to be significant in order to overcome the city's greatest obstacle: air travel. Even though air travel can be expensive, it is the way that all competitors and their support staff must travel for national and international events. Air access to Kingston is too little, too infrequent and too restricted. With fewer than 160 seats per day into and out of Kingston, there aren't enough seats to get four Memorial Cup hockey teams into Kingston in one day, even with every seat assigned to hockey, a scenario Air Canada is not likely to accept.

All competitors and their support staff would have to travel through Toronto to get to Kingston. This is expensive and limiting, particularly for teams and fans from Atlantic Canada.

An intangible in the bidding and hosting process is the fact that the sport community in Canada is very small. Decision-makers and those with influence in the franchises have reached their positions through many years of volunteer service in their associations and have been to every part of the country. They know decision-makers and powerful people throughout the country. Consequently, every city bidding for a high-profile event must appreciate that there may be intangible as well as tangible obstacles.

For Kingston to successfully bid for a high-profile sport event, the bid package will have to be spectacular. When one stacks up what Kingston has to offer in comparison to other Canadian communities, there are crucial deficiencies.

Just to get its foot in the door, Kingston must first have a large entertainment venue where there is space for convenient access and egress and large parking lots, and, second, it must solve the air-travel problem. Without these, it will be an uphill battle all the way, and Kingston is unlikely to get such top prizes as the Memorial Cup, the Brier, the Scott Tournament of Hearts or Skate Canada.