TEAMS ’26 Winner Spotlight: The Course Spokane Valley

The annual TEAMS Conference & Expo, held October 26—29 in Birmingham, Alabama, included the annual SportsTravel Awards, which honors the events, venues and hosts that define excellence and drive the business of sports forward. Six awards were up for grabs: Best Amateur Sports Event; Best Collegiate Sports Event; Best Professional Sports Event; Best New Sports Event; Best New or Renovated Venue; and Best Sports Host City. In this series, we will highlight the individual winners of each category. 

This Course Spokane Valley, located in Spokane Valley, Washington, grew out of a simple need. Spokane Sports had been building running courses on golf courses and soccer venues. For a region with a strong running culture, it needed a running venue to match.

A feasability study determined that one could be built for just $7 million on land the city already owned, making it an easy decision. There was just one other factor: the study said that the venue would need to attract 900 people in its first year for it to be a success.

It got 20,000, with an estimated economic impact of $10 million.

Call it a runaway triumph. The 46-acre facility was built with the idea of redefining what a championship cross-country venue can be in the United States, and it did just that. In its debut year, The Course Spokane Valley has already secured a range of major events, including the West Coast Conference Championships, NWAC Championships, NCAA Division III Regional Championships, Nike Cross Regionals Northwest, and the 2027 NCAA Division I West Regional Championship. It utilizes a customizable course layout ranging from 0.5 miles to 10K and multiple viewing areas for spectators, and it’s just as popular with everyday runners as it is with elite athletes.

“Man, it’s incredible,” said Ashley Blake, CEO of Spokane Sports. “We’ve got national events, regional, college conferences, but it’s also open for our communities, with high school and youth programs that don’t have a tourism focus. It’s a very fortunate place to be and I could attribute a lot of that success to the fact that Spokane has a reputation and the know-how of producing these high-level events across a broad number of championships.

“Now were faced with a pretty interesting question. It’s no longer, ‘Can Spokane Valley be a hub for sports tourism and cross country running?’It’s, ‘How far do we want to take this?’ Which is an incredible place to be.”

Now The Course has a national accolade to go along with its local plaudits: the SportsTravel Award for Best New or Renovated Venue.

Start To Finish

Central to the venue’s design was making sure it could be used by runners at all levels. “For us it started with field of play,” said Blake. “How could we take the specs and look at the events we hosted and make sure this venue could be designed to those specs? It’s a fast course — our start line, and all of our turns are built to specification, and it was done all at once. We set out from the onset to design something that was going to be hosting championships, that was a really critical piece of this. So we polled USA Track & Field and the NCAA and looked at what are all the 1500-meter turns and 600-meter start lines and ensured we had loops for all the different distances.”

Having ensured the start lines and turns were in place, Spokane Sports then secured a grant of $282,000 from the state to do the finish line arch, which is where the timing system would be located.

While The Course is in the middle of its competitive season that runs through mid-December, there are also eight tourism events planned for the venue.

“I’ll give the credit to the city of Spokane Valley and the stakeholders there,” said Blake. “The course is perfectly aligned with their values and their attributes, it allows them to carve out their own identity and their own brand. From the oustset the’ve really leaned into and understood the value that Spokane Sports brought. It’s been an incredible partnership and they’ve done a great job ensuring that their stakeholder engagement.”

The Course has also served one more purpose: serving as a recruiting tool for area colleges, including Gonzaga and Eastern Washington. But at its heart it will be used to give all members of the community a chance to enjoy the outdoors and get a little exercise.

“It’s really the best of both worlds,” said Blake. “High-profile national events and a way to ensure our kids benefit from it.”