Conference Schedule

From the college to the professional ranks, Pittsburgh has had a profound impact on the nation’s sporting history. Each of the professional sports teams (Pirates, Penguins, and Steelers) share the iconic black-and-gold color scheme, and each franchise has won multiple championships. The city was also home to two of Black baseball’s legendary teams, the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords. This session will highlight how professional teams, The Roberto Clemente Museum, and the city are telling this rich story through their tour programs and how the history and cultural identity of Pittsburgh can be gleaned through its sporting traditions. What part of Pittsburgh’s history is being conveyed to the public? What is being omitted from these tours? Through the insight of tour operators, this session will explore how to design and implement a tour program focusing on content development, tour guide training, including the game day experience, marketing, tour insurance, and visitor feedback. The session will also include a discussion of possible new tours to create such as a neighborhood walking tour or a bike tour.

This hands-on session will walk-through a case of study of the NASCAR Hall of Fame’s recent refresh of their Heritage Speedway exhibition – including scope, timeline, interpretation and lessons learned. The second part would be interactive with attendees challenged to create practical, interpretive strategies to re-energize a test case existing gallery without altering cases, objects, or infrastructure. Through the rapid collaborative exercise, participants will experiment with new interpretive “lenses,” test simple add on components, and rethink the stories their permanent exhibitions can tell. This session emphasizes nimble, iterative approaches that can be deployed by institutions of any size.

Among the sports museums that were targeted included the Boxing Hall of Fame, Yogi Berra Museum, the USGA Museum. and the National Museum of Racing. In each instance, vandals broke into these sports museums and stole priceless artifacts and later “melted them down to discs and bars. They sold the raw metal in the New York City area for hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to prosecutors. The ability of sports museums to safely protect these priceless memorabilia for public trust is at the core of each museum’s mission. This session will explore this story. Topics to be discussed include security measures prior to the thefts, points of vulnerability within each museum, how the vandals were caught and the legal process that led to justice, how the museums have since altered their security, how these thefts affect the museums, relatives of the Hall of Famers, and the local community.

Situated on the North Shore along the Ohio River, it is Pittsburgh’s most visited museum. The museum features over 100 hands-on exhibits, a digital planetarium, and an actual Cold War-era submarine. This visit will include their Sports 360 exhibit and their new Science of Speed experience.