Green Bay Packers
WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) — It was no surprise to Tim White of Visit Wausau.
He’s been involved with discussions about the logistics of Green Bay hosting the 2025 NFL Draft for months, so Monday’s announcement from the league was just the beginning of the real work that will go into helping the league’s smallest market throw its biggest off-season party. “Our job as Visit Wausau is to bring partners together to come up with creative and collective ideas that we can pull off as a community and we will be starting those discussions shortly,” said White. “We will be ready, Brad Toll [From Discover Green Bay] will include us in things, we work well together.”
Being ready will mean a lot of different things; from promoting Wausau as a third-tier option for fans who can’t find rooms in Green Bay or the Fox Valley to working with local businesses to find ways to extend the party beyond Lambeau and Titletown. He says he wants to see a wide range of options to encourage as much spending as possible during that week. “We want to talk to local businesses or vendors who are savvy enough to think creatively about promotions, parties, or specials. Even if people aren’t making plans to go there they will feed off the excitement of having the NFL Draft in our state.
“The really smart restaurants and bars are going to go ‘Hey, we’ve got this great special this week. Come on into our Draft Party.’ I think you will see a lot more Draft Parties than you’ve ever seen in Wisconsin,” added White.
He says that could be anything from a bar with drink and food specials to a full-blown watch party in Wausau’s 400 Block or Marathon Park where local fans could gather for beer and cheese curds to await their team’s selection.
White estimates that all of that activity will bring in between $500,000 and $900,000 to the Wausau area. Besides the tourist spending, he also expects some temporary jobs to be created in a wide radius around Green Bay as everyone works to accommodate hundreds of thousands of visitors over four days.
White says the league will likely have employees who will stay in Green Bay for a year or more to help prepare for the event, much like representatives from the USGA have been working in Stevens Point to help them pull off next month’s Men’s Senior Open at SentryWorld.
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