St. Johns Tourism Board Approves $200K in Sports Grants

Members of the St. Johns County Tourist Development Council started the year with a busy agenda of grant requests, approving funding for 11 events for a total of $200,000. In addition, members elected a new chair and vice chair.

Tera Meeks, Director of Tourism and Cultural Development, outlined the grant requests.

“We’ve been working kind of continuously with the parks and recreation program to look at how we handle sports tourism grants,” she said. “One of the things they’ve done is they’ve packaged them together. We do have quite a few sports tourism grants today.”

Grant recipients include the American Junior Golf Association Junior Players Championship set for Aug. 29-Sept. 3 with a request for $10,000; Ancient City Game Fish Association for two events – the Redfish Bash in April and the Kingfish Tournament in June – for a total of $25,000; the Jacksonville Football Club for two soccer events on April 26-28 and Aug. 30-Sept. 1 for a total of $15,000; Florida Elite Soccer Academy Pre-Season Youth Soccer Series over two weekends in August for $15,000; Lion’s Den Karate Ancient City Championship Martial Arts Tournament in August for $13,432; Ancient City Road Runners Matanzas 5000 Run in January for $15,000; National Wrestling Coaches Association 2024 NWCA Convention in July for $10,000; Northeast Florida Kingfish Championship Old School Kingfish Shootout for $20,000; New Horizons Entertainment River City Wrestling Con in June for $12,500; First Coast Sailing Association 2024 St. Augustine Race Week in April for $10,000; and four youth baseball events from Perfect Game Inc. in March, April, May and June for a total of $40,000.

Also at the meeting, Gayle Phillips was elected chair for 2024 and Irving Kass was elected vice chair of the TDC.