The Charlotte Sports Foundation’s Greatest Hits
Four major events that have raised the city’s economic profile—and money
The Charlotte Sports Foundation’s roots lie in what was both a triumph and an embarrassment: the 1994 NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four, held in the now-demolished Charlotte Coliseum on Tyvola Road. It was a triumph because it placed Charlotte at the center of the sporting world and welcomed tens of thousands of fans from Duke, Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas, the eventual champion.
It was an embarrassment because the organizing committee created the “Street of Champions,” a Potemkin village of temporary bars, restaurants, and clubs for guests along South Tryon Street uptown. It was designed to conceal Charlotte’s lack of nightlife, which effectively underlined it. The New York Times mocked it. Charlotte hosted a Women’s Final Four two years later. Neither has made an appearance here since.
Yet the Final Fours did yield a long-developing harvest. Civic leaders assembled an organization, the Charlotte Regional Sports Commission, to recruit high-level sporting events. An annual football bowl game—then called the Continental Tire Bowl, now the Duke’s Mayo Bowl—began in 2002. The city drew the ACC Football Championship Game in 2010, and another organization, Charlotte Collegiate Football, was created to oversee both events.
In 2013, the two entities merged to create the Charlotte Sports Foundation. Under the leadership of Danny Morrison—a former Carolina Panthers general manager who became its executive director in 2019—the CSF built on the foundation of an uptown that had developed a genuine tourism infrastructure in the 25 years since the Street of Champions. It branched far beyond a pair of college football games to hosting basketball, running, tennis, and other events, with potential for more.
Here are a few of the CSF’s landmark moments.
Dec. 4, 2010: ACC Championship Game
Attendance: 72,379
Estimated economic impact: $20 million
Charlotte benefited from Florida’s failures. The ACC, now headquartered in Charlotte, began playing a football championship game in 2005. For its first five years, it drew declining crowds in Jacksonville and Tampa. Conference leaders thought a relocation to Bank of America Stadium would place the game closer to the conference’s geographic center, and the result was a clear success: A record crowd watched quarterback Tyrod Taylor lead Virginia Tech over Florida State, 44-33. Charlotte has hosted the ACC Championship every year but one since, and it’s under contract to host the game through 2030.
The 2021 Duke’s Mayo Classic between Georgia and Clemson drew 74,187 fans to Bank of America Stadium. Courtesy, CSF
Sept. 2 and 4, 2021: Duke’s Mayo Classic weekend
Total Attendance: 109,939 (two games)
Estimated economic impact: $48.8 million
Charlotte had hosted opening-weekend college football games before, but this represented a step or two up the staircase. It kicked off the season after the empty-stadium, cardboard-cutout strangeness of the 2020 COVID season. It incorporated two games, the first on a Thursday night between in-state rivals East Carolina and Appalachian State. (The Mountaineers won, 33-19.) The second, a prime-time Saturday night game between third-ranked Clemson and fifth-ranked Georgia, was the weekend’s marquee game: televised live by ABC and important enough for ESPN to bring its signature Saturday morning college football show, College GameDay, to Romare Bearden Park. The Bulldogs won the game, 10-3. But Charlotte won the weekend.
Dec. 20 and 21, 2022: inaugural Jumpman Invitational
Total Attendance: 27,981 (four games)
Estimated economic impact: $10.2 million
This was a marriage of the CSF to a pair of prominent partners, Jordan Brand and ESPN Events, and a significant expansion beyond college football into college basketball. At a time of growing interest in women’s college basketball, it showcased the men’s and women’s teams from four high-profile programs—North Carolina, Michigan, Florida, and Oklahoma—in Spectrum Arena and live on ESPN networks. Jumpman ended its three-year run in 2024, but the 2024-25 basketball season ended with a kind of validation: One of its participants, the Florida Gators, won the men’s national championship.
Dec. 6, 2024: Charlotte Invitational
Attendance: 16,194
Estimated economic impact: $4.4 million
The numbers are comparatively modest, but this event brought four of the biggest names in tennis to the Queen City—including Carlos Alcaraz, the reigning Wimbledon and French Open champion. (The others: Frances Tiafoe, Madison Keys, and Sloane Stephens.) It was the city’s first big-time tennis event, and it was compelling enough to draw prominent present and former Carolina Panthers like Greg Olsen, Steve Smith Sr., and Andy Dalton. It indicated, too, how far the CSF and Charlotte’s status as a sports destination has come since the days when it had to manufacture excitement.
