In Three Years, this “Generational” Global Sports Event Will Descend on the Triangle

Sports are an inextricable touchstone of culture in North Carolina. NC universities tout some of the most successful collegiate sports programs in the nation, especially in the Triangle. Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill are perennial powerhouses, notably in men’s basketball and women’s soccer, with rabid fanbases at home and abroad.

The region’s professional teams also are a major draw. The Durham Bulls are one of baseball’s most storied franchises, with massive success on the field, and on the big screen with Bull Durham. And just this past June, the Carolina Hurricanes professional hockey franchise won its second Stanley Cup, with tens of thousands of fans storming the streets of Raleigh in celebration.

But three years from now, those events may feel like your kid’s tee ball league compared to the international takeover coming this way. In 2029, the Triangle, and parts of the Triad, will play host to the World University Games—the world’s largest event for student-athletes, and the second-largest multi-sport competition on the planet behind only the Olympics. 

“This is an opportunity to step us out onto the world stage,” Hill Carrow, chairman and CEO of the North Carolina Organizing Committee for the FISU World University Games (WUG), told the INDY.

The scale is hard to overstate. Over 12 days, more than 7,000 athletes and officials from 150 countries representing 600 universities will compete in 15 core sports that largely mirror the Olympics: track and field, swimming, gymnastics, water polo, among others. Organizers project roughly 600,000 spectators—nearly double the population of Durham—with a worldwide broadcast audience topping 300 million.

The bidding process for the 2029 games began in 2018. Two potential hosts from the U.S. were put forward for the first round of national voting: North Carolina and Texas. North Carolina successful bid involved more than 1,000 people and organizations, with Carrow, a former swimmer at UNC-Chapel Hill who has a long career in organizing large-scale sports championships across the country, at the helm (As CEO of the Triangle Sports Commission, he also led efforts to recruit USA Baseball from Arizona to Cary in the early 2000s.)

One of the region’s primary advantages, according to Carrow, was the more than 100 competitive sports facilities already in place across the Triangle and Triad. Organizers plan to leverage on-campus facilities at schools like Duke, NC State and UNC Greensboro, as well as public-owned complexes like the Greensboro Coliseum and the Durham County Stadium.

“We don’t have to build anything,” Carrow said. “We’ve got a lot of really good assets. The rest of the world doesn’t build their universities like we do. In Germany, where the games were last summer, not a single event took place on a university campus. Most of the athletes stayed in hotels, whereas we can house them right on campus and live up to that whole name—university games.”

Warming Up

With three years to go, organizers are already hard at work. 

Sixteen universities, seven counties and nine municipalities, along with dozens of other organizations are responsible for collaborating on the WUG, Carrow said, in addition to thousands of volunteers and local staff who will be integral to the event’s success.

Securing the athletic facilities was just a piece of the puzzle. Participants will need housing and transportation, as well as on-site medical staff and security in and around the events. Utilizing the school campuses keeps a large portion of the operation—housing, dining, and competition—centrally located. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a laundry list of logistics to consider before and during the two-week long event. Organizers will have to work as a team to clear each of those hurdles, which could lead to more collaboration in the future.

“This allows us to dream and think about our capacity, our infrastructure, what it takes to win a bid, and what we can do collectively to host these types of events moving forward,” Marcus Manning, director of the Durham Sports Commission since 2020, told the INDY.

The Durham Sports Commission, the primary recruiter and organizer of major sporting events in the Bull City, has led the charge on preparing for Durham’s hosting duties, coordinating with local partners like the Durham Bulls, Duke University, and North Carolina Central University (NCCU), all host sites for the games.

Louis Perkins, NCCU athletic director, said the WUG is a huge opportunity to showcase the historic campus on an international stage; The school will host basketball, bringing thousands of fans inside McDougald-McLendon Arena, many for the first time.

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“It’s a chance to accentuate all the positives you have,” Perkins said. “You only get one chance to make a first impression.”

Perkins is acquainted with the rigors of being a collegiate athlete. He served as a four-year captain of the NCCU tennis team and earned Academic All-American honors. Nothing in his career as a student athlete nor athletic director rises to the level of expectation he and others have for the World University Games.

“I’ve been to NCAA championships, but never on a campus where 100 different countries are represented,” Perkins said. “To have that many people flowing through Durham and then coming down Fayetteville Street; I find it to be exciting, and I’m so glad that as an institution and community, we’re embracing it.”

Hosting an event at this scale won’t be cheap: Organizers estimate it will cost roughly $100 million to operate through private, state and local funding. But Carrow and others expect the boost to the local economy to exceed triple that figure—nearly $370 million—and are positioning the event as a long-term investment in the region’s profile as a sports tourism destination, not just a 12-day competition.

“When we first won the bid, we talked about how we have a five-year window to really leverage and utilize the World University Games as a commercial to talk about sports tourism and the collective effort that it takes to really be successful and have sustained success with sports tourism,” Manning said.

A Global Event

The modern version of the WUG traces back to 1959, when the Fédération Internationale du Sport Universitaire (FISU)—known in English as the International University Sports Federation—held the inaugural competition in Turin, Italy. The event has run more than two dozen times since, most recently in Germany’s Rhine-Ruhr region last year.

The U.S. has hosted the WUG only once before, in 1993 in Buffalo, where American athletes brought home 74 medals, 30 more than second-place Canada. Sprinter Kevin Lyles won gold in the 4x400m relay there before retiring from competition—four years before the birth of his son, Noah, who would go on to become one of the fastest sprinters in American history.

In last year’s games in Germany, 11 athletes with ties to North Carolina competed in a variety of events; Bomin Kim, an incoming sophomore at Duke University, is a world-class martial artist who took home the gold at the 2022 Junior World Championships, and Sarah Harper is a Raleigh native and incoming sophomore on UNC-Chapel Hill’s rowing team who founded her high school’s triathlon club (which really makes you question what you’re doing with your life). A future World University Game competitor could be among us, but we likely won’t know until the final days before the event starts. The deadline for final rosters is 30 days before the games begin in July 2029.

“It’s a generational type event,” Manning said. “These types of events don’t happen often in your backyard, and it brings the entire state together in a lot of ways. The cool thing is we’re talking about this collectively, and we’re representing the United States at home, and it’s happening here in our region.”

Carrow and Manning hope the games can replicate some of the magic from the World Cup earlier this summer, when cultures from around the world descended on North America and instigated a powerful, and possibly ethereal, moment of human connection that transcended competition.

Algerians made their base in Lawrence, Kansas; the Scots drank the entire city of Boston under the table; and Mexican-South Korean kinship gave us the “Coreano hermano ya eres Mexicano” chant. Many spectators also found ways to connect the World Cup on and off the field, adopting favorite players because of their personal journeys, or participating in postgame rituals like the Norwegian’s Viking Row.

Thanks in part to the Research Triangle and the university system, North Carolina has a growing population of non-English speakers; about 1 in 9 North Carolinians speak a language other than English at-home. Even residents who aren’t sports diehards can take pride in cheering on their home countries as they strive for greatness. Carrow, who lives in Morrisville, said his neighborhood is a melting pot of folks from places like China, India, and Norway, and has encouraged them to participate in the festivities.

“We have a lot of folks in North Carolina that, if they haven’t directly moved here from other countries, they have family there, and so yes, we want to encourage the kind of things that happened around the World Cup, even on a more modest scale,” Carrow said. “That would be fantastic to motivate all the different populations across North Carolina and other parts of the country that hopefully will come here as well as the international folks to cheer on their team.”

Ultimately, Carrow sees success not just in medals or hotel stays, but in what the event does for the region’s reputation abroad, and its ability to show that local universities, cities, and counties can function as a single, unified team.

“I’d really like to see everybody afterwards saying, ‘Hey, the sum was really greater than the individual parts when we all came together, and look at what we are able to do when we all joined forces.’”

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