From Courts to Courses, Milwaukee Wins at Sports Tourism
Say “Milwaukee sports,” and the mind goes straight to the highlight reel. The crack of bat meeting ball in the thick August air. The roar of fans as greatness unfolds. You think of Major League legend Bob Uecker, his voice a fixture for generations, and yes, you picture the Brewers, riding high with a roster that’s still making headlines and keeping fans in seats through every pitch.
You might picture Giannis Antetokounmpo, defying both gravity and Phoenix Suns’ defenders in 2021, the “Valley Oop” pushing the Bucks toward NBA Finals victory, Mike Breen’s voice ringing like a bell:
“Antetokounmpo throws it down!”
These are moments that live in memory — big-league, nationally televised, immortal.
Professional sports remain the beating heart of Milwaukee’s tourism engine. The Bucks bring roughly 17,500 fans downtown for 41 home games at Fiserv Forum. American Family Field averages 31,000 per Brewers game across an 81-game season, and with the team trending strong, that energy has only amped up, turning every game into a magnet event. Planned winterization will soon make the park a year-round destination, giving Marissa Werner, director of Sports Milwaukee, new seasons to sell: from baseball to winter tournaments and major indoor competitions.
But Milwaukee’s sports identity is more than just its anchor teams. It pulses in smaller venues, in unexpected corners of athletic passion that rarely hit SportsCenter.
“We have so many organizations here in the community that are focused on growing their own sports,” says Werner. “It’s all around, and people don’t always realize they’re part of the full picture of sports tourism.”
Werner has spent 14 years building that picture, piece by piece. It’s fencing. It’s wrestling. It’s triathlons and Irish hurling. It’s 52,502 hotel stays in 2024 alone, which meant $74 million pumped into the veins of small businesses, restaurants, bars, and breweries. Together with the city’s major-league franchises, these events form a tourism portfolio that brings both massive, headline-making weekends and a steady stream of quieter but no less impactful visitor spending.
An unlikely arena
Fencing and triathlon have little in common. One happens indoors, confined to a narrow strip where combatants trade points in bursts of elegance and precision. The other takes place across sprawling swaths of lake and land, hours of movement where the city itself becomes the arena.
But both have found something like a home here.
In 2015, USA Fencing brought the North American Cup to Milwaukee’s downtown convention center. The event was well-received, but the building, then the Wisconsin Center, was too small for the sport’s biggest stage, the Summer Nationals. That changed with a 2024 expansion to the rebranded Baird Center, which now offers 1.3 million total square feet.
“That was the first thing I bid on,” Werner says. She landed it.
In 2025, 11,000 visitors arrived for a 10-day stretch overlapping the Fourth of July, traditionally a slow week in the city. The economic impact? Nearly $11 million. The other impact — restaurants full on a Tuesday night, bar stools taken by people in warm-up jackets and team colors — was harder to quantify but no less real.
USA Triathlon’s courtship of Milwaukee began earlier, in 2013. The city proved an almost suspiciously perfect fit. Hotels sit a short walk from the Lake Michigan waterfront, where athletes swim, bike, and run. Families can wander from a finish line to a microbrewery in 10 minutes.
“In other cities, you’re way out on the edge of town, in farmland, because it’s easier to get permits,” says Stephen Meyers, the group’s spokesman. “Here, you can race, then walk to your hotel, then be at a restaurant in five minutes. That changes everything.”
The athletes come for the competition. They stay, sometimes literally, for the Brewers game down the street. The triathlon’s numbers in 2023, which brought 21,000 athletes and spectators and $9.2 million in spending, tell one part of the story. The other part is the kids who, over the course of the event, are coaxed into trying the sport themselves.
“Sports tourism is a different animal than meetings and conventions,” Werner says, who has now welcomed USA Triathlon back to Milwaukee seven times since that first event in 2013. “It’s about filling hotels and driving economic impact, yes, but it’s also about what it does for the health and wellness of our community. It’s about getting youth out to play and introducing them to sports.”
The accidental architect
Werner didn’t intend to be Milwaukee’s ambassador to the sporting world. She left for Fordham University on a Division I Women’s Volleyball scholarship, then took a job with Hyatt Hotels, eventually moving to Los Angeles. She came home, briefly, she thought, to escape the traffic.
Sixteen years later, she’s still here.
A short-term gig with the Milwaukee Bucks led to an introduction at Visit Milwaukee. The organization wanted to create a sports tourism division from scratch. Werner didn’t know such a thing existed.
For nearly a decade, she was the entire staff, a one-woman band responsible for both the wins and the misses. She brokered relationships. She convinced governing bodies that Milwaukee was worth the gamble. She learned that sports tourism is a game of patience; an Olympic committee might book a venue three years in advance, or not at all.
“It’s a relationship,” says Pete Isais, director of national events for USA Wrestling, who has worked with Werner for nearly a decade. “That’s taken a while to develop.”
Now, her operation has grown to three people, with even bigger things on the horizon, including supporting The Opportunity Center, a $100 million sports and fitness facility for people of all abilities on Milwaukee’s North Side.
Beyond the scoreboard
From the Brewers heating up the pennant chase to a triathlon that turns the city into an arena, Milwaukee doesn’t just host events, it owns them. Werner’s mission is to make sure that streak never slows, stacking one win after another until Milwaukee is known in every league, every sport, every season.
“This is everything I’ve built from the ground up,” she says. “It’s fun to be entrepreneurial. And it’s amazing to see.”
In Milwaukee, the scoreboard isn’t just about points. It’s about the visitors, the dollars they leave behind, and the unforgettable moments that keep this city in the game, and on top.
Learn more and plan your trip at visitmilwaukee.org. This article originally appeared in the Business Journals as a paid advertisement by Visit Milwaukee.