Sports Editor Justin Kline offers his take on Plant City’s growth and how local sports contribute to it.
If you read our newspaper regularly, you’ve probably noticed that our past few issues have been business-heavy. That’s no coincidence: big changes are coming to Plant City and coming sooner than later.
Plant City’s economic development has been the talk of the town in the new year, getting to a point where I’ve had several of my section interview subjects bring it up. Many people around here are excited to see what will happen to the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World as we get closer to reaching our slate of Hillsborough County’s Imagine 2040 Long Range Transportation Plan’s goals. We even have coaches going the extra mile to get their kids more prepared to run businesses in the future.
But I also read our Facebook page, and I see that there are quite a few people who are resistant to upcoming changes. Some folks simply don’t want to sacrifice Plant City’s small-town feel and I understand that. Our town does have charm that other parts of Hillsborough can’t match and that’s valuable.
I’m of the opinion that all this growth is a good thing for Plant City. Maybe it won’t be such a small town 20 years from now, but it has the potential to be one of the more economically important towns in the state if everything goes according to plan. We have successful businesses, three of the strongest academic high schools in Florida, the Florida Strawberry Festival and, of course, a thriving local sports scene that does big numbers without big leagues.
I know just how important Plant City’s sports scene is to the local government, having covered it for about three and one half years. While we’re not going to host a Super Bowl anytime soon, our current facilities are both well-maintained and versatile — two things that attract leagues and organizations looking to host events. It’s no accident that our parks are being used for sports most weeks out of the year, often for tournament play.
The revenue our local businesses generate from such events can’t be understated. That’s (partly) why people are constantly trying to build new hotels and restaurants here, generally near Interstate 4. That’s why you have groups such as Visit Plant City, which I covered in our 2017 Forecast edition, making a big effort to market our sports scene.
And we also have the benefit of an administration that is strongly pro-sports. Mayor Rick Lott is a longtime soccer coach who gave kids the opportunity last year to go play in Europe — something many of those players probably never thought would happen to them.
I’m excited to see Plant City grow, and I’m even happier that sports are currently playing an important part in that. If — hopefully ‘when’— we finally convince Chick-fil-A and Target to come to our town, we’ll have big sporting events and the Recreation and Parks Department to thank for it.
