Local events add up to big impact

This Saturday, the McCook swim team will host teams from four area towns during a swim meet at the YMCA, which means hundreds of visitors to our community for the day.

Over the weekend, several hundred additional visitors will descend upon McCook for the 24 ½ annual Buffalo Commons Storytelling and Music Festival.

Last weekend, golfers were everywhere during Community Hospital’s annual John Mullen Pro-Am golf tournament. And more than three dozen two-person high school fishing teams competed at Red Willow Lake, bringing with them supporters and the actual owners of their boats, their parents.

From baseball games to camping and boating, equine events to arts happenings, there are many opportunities around the area for people to visit - or even consider moving - to our communities.

Because of our smaller sized towns, these events tend to have a bigger impact, both financially and psychologically. There is a certain sense of pride when you see all these out-of-town plates on Main Street, getting to experience what we get to experience every day.

Next month, McCook will host two major swim meets as part of the Plains Tsunami Swim League, which includes more than three dozen teams from three states.

On July 10, McCook will be hoping with shoppers during Crazy Days, while the swimming pool will be filled with hundreds of swimmers as part of a qualifying swim meet.

And then on July 17, anywhere from 1,200 to 1,500 swimmers and their families and fans will descend upon the McCook City Pool for a day of competitive swimming.

For years, this final meet was hosted in Lexington, where they have a tremendous aquatic center with an 8-lane competition pool as well as a separate pool with water slides and a zero-entry area. (But I’m not here to compare pools today; trust me, that will be a later column.)

Fortunately, McCook does have an 8-lane pool, the minimum needed to host such a large swim meet. We also have the hotels, the restaurants and the retail to support an event like this.

Organizers from the league were in McCook recently to prepare for the July 17 meet and their comments struck home. Organizers said the league felt welcomed in McCook, that it felt wanted, that it felt appreciated for being here. Whereas other communities might see the meet as a burden, we have an opportunity to embrace these types of events and make a significant impression on the community.

We can’t let these types of opportunities pass us by, from the dollars they bring to town to just exposing people to everything our community has to offer.

And while I am focusing on events and activities around our area, the same holds true for businesses.

If Mac’s Drive-In opened in Omaha, would anyone really notice? It would be among the dozens of restaurants in a one-mile radius. Yet, we all lamented when they had to cut back their hours, forcing us to have our homemade onion rings for lunch rather than dinner. Could you imagine the uproar if Mac’s shut its doors?

That being said, if we want these businesses to exist in McCook for the times when visitors are here, we need to frequent them with our dollars when visitors aren’t here. If we want these events to happen, community members need to step up, get involved and volunteer to make it happen. And perhaps most importantly, if we want these activities to take place in McCook, we need to have the infrastructure to host larger events to draw people to our area, whether it is a large ball complex, a new welcoming aquatic center or an updated convention center.

We have many opportunities to make things happen which can have a tremendous impact on our communities. All these events and activities, as well as thriving businesses, add up to make sure that our communities will be around for generations to come.

If we all work together to make these events and businesses successful, we can truly make an impact and we can make our communities an even better place to call home.