Sports tourism is expected to have a $20 million impact on Owensboro this year. Jared Bratcher is sports marketing director for the Owensboro-Daviess County Convention & Visitors Bureau. He tells the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer there will be more than 50 tournaments, including figure skating, hockey, baseball, running, soccer, softball, basketball, tennis, volleyball, fishing and football.There's some type of tournament in town every month and they’ll fill every hotel room in the city on 10 weekends this year. Bratcher says a 32,000-square-foot indoor sports complex called the Next Level created a year-round home for tournaments last year. The community's Edge Ice Center is beginning to bring in ice skating and hockey. And when the convention center opens next year Bratcher says he hopes to get even more competitions.
Todd Hatton hails from Paducah, Kentucky, where he got into radio under the auspices of the late, great John Stewart of WKYX while a student at Paducah Community College. He also worked at WKMS in the reel-to-reel tape days of the early 1990s before running off first to San Francisco, then Orlando in search of something to do when he grew up. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Murray State University. He vigorously resists adulthood and watches his wife, Angela Hatton, save the world one plastic bottle at a time.
