The staging of sport events directly impacts the quality of life of people living in the host communities. Sport events are temporal and can trigger a variety of short- or long-term, positive or negative impacts, which lead to positive or negative outcomes, and if sustained, these outcomes have been called ‘legacies.’ Impacts may result from strategic planning, but more often than not there is scant strategic planning for event outcomes, so impacts are typically haphazard and unplanned (albeit hoped for). Strategic planning for event outcomes (aka: leveraging) differs from mere legacy planning because it focuses attention on the means to obtain desired economic, social, and/or environmental objectives through integration of each event into the host community’s overall product and service mix (Chalip, 2014). Whereas legacy planning focuses on the event and the outcomes it might render for the community, event leverage focuses on the community and the ways that it can integrate each event into its marketing and management strategies. These are different in ways that are subtle but important in practice.
