Sin City Shootout is the “largest annual LGBT sporting event in the world” and takes place right here in Las Vegas. Now in its 10th year in our city, the event is set to run from Jan. 12-15 and promises 25 sports, over 8,500 athletes and plenty of parties and other events to keep you entertained. Ahead of the event, we spoke with founder and tournament director Eric Ryan about the event’s history, highlight moments, its importance to Las Vegas and, of course, sports.

How did this all start? Tell us a bit about the inspiration and that first year. Back in early 2007, I was at a softball event and there were challenges they had with their scheduling which negatively affected teams traveling to compete in their event. It left a lot of their softball players unhappy, including myself and my team. The 2-hour drive home to Los Angeles was just a lot of thoughts about the way they ran their event and what could be done better. And it just so happened that the weekend after I was making one of my annual trips to Las Vegas to play in a poker tournament. So the next week and after that tournament as I was driving into Las Vegas in the early evening going up the 15 freeway, off in the distance I saw the bright lights from a park. It was obviously lights from some kind of sports field. A lightbulb immediately went off in my head about, “Gee, why don’t they have a gay softball tournament here in Vegas?” I pulled off the freeway and went to the park. The fields just looked terrific – better than anything we had played on in Southern California. So instead of playing in the poker tournament that weekend, I spent three days driving around to different parks, looking at different fields, making notes and scoping out what would it actually take to rent these fields from Clark County, City of Las Vegas and so forth. 

I got all the information from those parks, came back home and started putting numbers together. I took the idea to our local softball league and said, “Hey, let’s do a fundraiser tournament for our Greater Los Angeles softball league in Las Vegas.” And they all looked at me like I was crazy. They’re like, “We all live down here in Los Angeles. We can’t do a tournament in another state.” I’ve never been one to accept “no” means “no”. “No” means just find a different way to get to a “yes” or get things accomplished. So I spent the next four or five months traveling to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. I made quite a few trips talking to the Visitors Convention Bureau, different hotels and said, “You know what? I’m going to put this tournament on myself.” Everything eventually was falling into place and I started promoting it to teams. I told my local league, they saw that I was putting things together and the event was going to happen and said, “Can we still be a part of this?” So each year the non-profit beneficiary is the Greater Los Angeles Softball Association. We raise funds for its yearly activities and the promotion of LGBT athletics in the Los Angeles area.

I would say probably about year three or four of Sin City, I had friends who played in wrestling, basketball and soccer, in different LGBT leagues, and the one thing they all said about their events and their annual tournaments was, “They just don’t have the camaraderie that softball does.” They might have a couple dozen athletes, but softball gets hundreds if not thousands of people and teams together. They really wished their events had that. Again, another light bulb went off and I thought, “Why don’t we hold a wrestling tournament, a soccer tournament, a basketball tournament, etc., alongside Sin City Shootout? Our collective numbers together would get us better buying power at the clubs, at the hotels, at the restaurants, at the events.” That first year of all the sports together, it really took off. The word got out there and the momentum grew each year, really organically. It just has grown tremendously by other sports wanting to be involved. Now we’re up to 25 sports. This year we’re actually adding a diving competition, which will take place at UNLV. 

So what was the second sport you added? The second sport was actually wrestling. Wrestling does not have a large number of athletes per say, so for it to hold an event on its own, it’s very difficult, because they either need to rent a gym location or someplace big enough for all the mats. With softball, with all of the numbers and the number of hotel rooms, we are able to say, “Hey, we need a ballroom to hold wrestling in.” So again, our collective numbers benefit each other. We really all feed off each other and benefit each other with our attendees. It’s our collective numbers that not only give us better buying power and allow the smaller sports to grow and allow the smaller sports to actually have a word class event that everybody wants to attend, but it also allows all of us to cross-socialize.

This latest edition will be the 10th anniversary of Sin City Shootout. What has been the most gratifying moment for you? Let me share an annual memory. I have a committee that helps me put the event on and I truly give them a tremendous amount of credit, but a lot of the responsibilities I take on myself because I really take it to heart that here are thousands of individuals travelling hundreds and thousands of miles to Las Vegas to participate, compete and have fun in an event that I basically say is going to happen. I really take it to heart that these athletes, their families and friends spend a lot of money to come and compete. But to answer your question, the biggest annual gratifying moment I have is that Friday night registration party we have. When the doors open, I go behind the scenes, I go in the back little hallway or up to my room for a minute and I truly have just an emotional release of tears. When everything I created comes together, the event has started and is in motion, everything I put in place is in the hands of the volunteers and staff. But it’s one of those happy emotional cries. “I can breathe. Everything’s on autopilot now. All of our sport coordinators are there, all of our volunteers are in place.” Just a moment of, “Everything’s in their hands. Everything I put together is their hands. Now they just have to execute it.” 

I love being at that Friday night event because I think it’s a beautiful picture of the LGBT community in all of its diversity. And allies as well. Thank you. And just to go along with that, we have 25 sports and everybody is represented. Everybody gets along and it truly is about the athletes. That’s the main focus of the event. Everybody loves to come and have the parties at night, but it truly is about what’s the most memorable and best time we can make and give the athletes that are travelling all this way. That’s what is really, really important to me, is to give them that memorable experience. The city of Vegas itself is a draw because of the glitz and the glamor and everything it has to offer. But just as an event, “What can we give that LGBT athlete to make it the best time we can?” And I think each year we try to expand on it and accomplish that each year. 

What is one of the biggest challenges in putting on an event like this? Probably the biggest challenge is making everyone happy. It’s extremely difficult with so many different segments of the LGBT market coming for one event. The one thing that draws everybody together is the sports. But the biggest challenge is, “Okay, after the sporting events are over, does somebody want a nightclub experience? Do they want the cowboy experience? The sports bar experience? Do they want a lesbian bar experience?” It really is a big feat to have something for everyone to do off the field, or at least to give them an opportunity to do something off the field. It’s also finding those host hotels that give those folks that want the opportunity just to relax in the jacuzzi and not go out and party. One thing we did was partner with Cirque du Soleil and Zumanity. They’ve been great to work with and providing a lot of support to make the event a memorable experience for our athletes. So again, it’s giving our attendees the opportunity to go to these shows at a good price, hopefully better than they normally would get during a vacation to Las Vegas. 

What are some of the more recent sports added to Sin City Shootout? How do they get added? This year we’ve added diving. The way sports are added is really organic. I’ll get an email from somebody saying, “Hey, I really wish you had this sport.” And I’ll ask them, “Well, do you know anything about organizing that sport?” They’ll either say “yes” or “no” and I’ll ask them if they know someone who does have the skills to organize a sport like that and have them contact me and ask them to be the sport coordinator for that sport and get the ball moving that way. That happened this year with diving. Within two or three hours, I was on a conference call with our diving coordinator, David Freedman. David himself happened to help run diving at the Rio Olympics and that brought a tremendous amount of skill and knowledge to that sport itself.

In recent years, we added swimming, running and even bridge has been a sport we offer for quite a few years now. Usually it seems to be one sport per year added the last couple of years. We’re getting to a point where we pretty much offer all the sports Vegas can accommodate. It would be a big challenge and a little bit of a drive to get some yachts out to Lake Mead, but we could offer sailing if the athletes want them. Even surfing, it definitely crossed my mind over at Mandalay Bay with the wave pool and beach they have there. Their waves just aren’t big enough yet! 

Billiards was recently added as well, correct? Billiards came on about four years ago and our billiards sport coordinator is from the Las Vegas LGBT billiards organization. 

What sport is particular popular with locals? The Sin City Shootout taking place in Las Vegas actually led to the creation of Las Vegas’ first and only LGBT softball association. After about year three of the Sin City Shootout, some local Las Vegas residents contacted me and said, “We love this. We would love to have a gay softball league here in Vegas. How do we do it?” And I met with them and had quite a few meetings, long phone conversations and told them about how the LGBT softball circuit across the U.S. works, what to do to join the national organization and they used our Los Angeles Softball League as a model to get one going in Las Vegas. There are over 40 member cities in the national LGBT softball organization and all of these cities send athletes to different tournaments across the U.S. and Canada.

What makes Sin City Shootout so successful? What advice would you give to other LGBT events looking to thrive as much as yours does? From what the LVCVA [the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority] has told me, it’s Vegas’ largest LGBT tourist event, as far as the number of LGBT guests it draws. The biggest piece of advice I would give to other event planners trying to do something in Vegas is to just think about all Vegas has to offer and how their attendees would enjoy it. There’s shows, there’s clubs, there’s hotels. You have to think about all your attendees from A to Z and really look at that middle point that will get everybody to stay. One of Sin City Shootout’s biggest and best attributes that make it a success each year is having the majority of attendees in one host hotel. We have 1,400 rooms per night booked at the Tropicana. So 24 hours a day, anytime of the day, you leave your room and you see other LGBT guests in the lobby, casino, restaurants and bars. It just leads to that larger level of comfort that you may not get in a larger 4,000-5,000 room hotel. I see it every year: there’s guys and gals sitting at the blackjack tables and they just win a big hand and they lean over and give each other a big hug and a kiss. Well if they did that in one of the mainstream Strip hotels where we don’t have almost a complete buyout of the hotel, there might be some backlash, especially with the recent election. We want all our attendees to feel safe and feel comfortable and to be able to be themselves more than anything. And the Tropicana as a hotel has really opened its doors and allowed us to be ourselves within their property and, as much as they can, help us off their property with different venues and contacts and so forth.

Have you seen positive progression in regards to LGBT acceptance in Las Vegas over the last 10 years? Over the last 10 years, about every two months I make a planning trip to Las Vegas because it truly is a year of event planning and keeping up contacts and going to the city council meetings and meeting with all the parks and recreation departments in the Las Vegas region. 

Over the years, I’ve seen slight changes. But when we really don’t have a buyout of the hotel, there have been instances in the past where there have been little comments when two girls or guys were holding hands. And I truly want our athletes to feel comfortable, so that’s why a complete buyout of a hotel is great for us. I don’t hear as many comments when we’ve been around town, but you still see and feel the glances when you are holding hands with somebody walking through one of the other casinos, one of the other restaurants. Or we’ve checked in and there’s two of you and you ask for one king bed… I’ve felt that at other properties. So it’s gotten better, but it hasn’t completely gone away.

Events like Sin City Shootout that continue to redefine boundaries and bring that community and that understanding to the city of Las Vegas are really priceless. I think it’s important for people to see the value in what it does for us locally. Without a doubt. And to clarify – the hotels, the venues themselves, I have seen a tremendous increase in LGBT acceptance. The challenges around that acceptance don’t come from the properties or venues themselves in Las Vegas, They come from the fellow tourists, because they are drawing from every segment of the population worldwide to Las Vegas. And, as we know, there are many places here in our own country where we’re not accepted. So that’s where I see challenges for our attendees in town. 

Well fortunately the vast majority of the memories have been positive. It’s been remarkable to watch you grow from your first year to this point. I look forward to taking in this year’s edition of Sin City Shootout and the many more to come. Thank you so much. We’ll see everyone there. 

Sin City Shootout takes place from Jan. 12 to Jan. 15. 

For more information, visit
www.SinCityShootout.com.