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Posted Feb 26, 2026, 5:25 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Downtown Los Angeles
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How Salt Lake City evolved into a sports boomtown — and MLB expansion frontrunner
February 23, 2026 - ...An MLB team would be a seismic addition for Utah’s already exploding sports scene. “It has grown almost exponentially,” Mendenhall says, “but it doesn’t feel like a reach, because Salt Lake City has been evolving right alongside the sports market.”
A market once monopolized by the NBA’s Utah Jazz has emerged as America’s next sports boomtown, with the arrival of an NHL franchise, frontrunner status in MLB expansion, and the return of the Winter Olympics in 2034. Salt Lake City’s transformation into a Mountain West sports hub seems sudden. But those involved describe it as a “crescendo” of two decades of methodical planning since the 2002 Winter Olympics to situate Utah as a year-round sporting destination. That crescendo has swelled into a cacophony of construction sounds throughout the Salt Lake Valley...
...Readiness has put Utah at an advantage. While other cities announced their entries into MLB expansion consideration with renderings and merch, Salt Lake City arrived with a 100-acre site, a coalition of prominent Utahns, broad bipartisan support, a plan for public funding and a reputable anchor investor. Gail Miller took over the LHM Company after her husband, Larry, the auto dealer who saved the Jazz from relocating, died in 2009. Now, after selling the Jazz and the family’s fleet of car dealerships, Gail and her children are leading efforts to land an MLB franchise. Commissioner Rob Manfred wants the league’s next expansion cities settled before he retires in 2029. Utah’s Power District presents a turnkey option.
The market is already bigger than you’d think, yet not nearly as big as it could become. The population of the Salt Lake City-Provo-Orem-Ogden corridor, now 3 million, has roughly doubled since MLB last expanded in 1998. That surge is one of the forces driving the evolution of Utah sports, as are the state’s economic forecast and its pro-business, sports-friendly legislature. But the “secret sauce,” says Jeff Robbins of the Utah Sports Commission, is how the state’s public and private stakeholders work in unison to prepare for new opportunities.
It’s also not difficult to see how the Power District would work as a ballpark district. The site is easily accessible, bordered by three interstates and a light-rail line, and situated between the city’s central business district and the airport, a five-minute drive from each. That proximity would be rare in any major-league metropolis; finding 100 acres of developable land so close to downtown, almost unheard of. “It’s an unparalleled opportunity,” Starks says. “Like The Battery, but five minutes from downtown.”
“We don’t mess around in Utah,” Adams says. “We’re ready, willing and able.”
Scott Sandall, a Republican member of the Utah State Senate, compares it to being invited to a black-tie event. As others scurry to get ready, he says, “We have our tuxedo on. And we’re there a half hour early.”
Ahead of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony earlier this month, an 82-year-old Utahn woman with white hair and a warm smile carried the Olympic torch through a shopping center in downtown Milan, Italy. Crowds pressed close. She waved. They cheered. It was Gail Miller’s second Olympic torch relay. The first, 24 years ago, was in her hometown of Salt Lake City.
A large contingent traveled from Salt Lake City to Milan to look ahead to the 2034 Winter Olympics. If anything, Olympic officials said, Utah is overprepared. Venues are ready. Organizers have raised more than $250 million from private and corporate donors, plus a pledge from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City, for financial support, volunteers and use of its land...
...The Olympics will return in 2034 to a radically different Utah. Since 2002, the state has added NHL, MLS, NWSL, pro lacrosse and softball franchises. It has hosted UFC fight nights, X Games and an NBA All-Star Game. An NHL Winter Classic is next. The University of Utah and Brigham Young University athletic programs are flush with financing. There are gleaming athletic facilities all over the region — new ballparks for the Utes and the Salt Lake Bees (the Miller-owned Triple-A affiliate of the Los Angeles Angels), state-of-the-art practice facilities for the Jazz and the NHL’s Utah Mammoth, an under-renovation Delta Center and more...
...Nothing lends credence to the viability of another Big Four franchise in Salt Lake City like three nail-biting periods at the Delta Center. It’s a midseason game on a school night after the holidays, yet there’s a capacity crowd ready to explode at every shot and skirmish. Fans wear sweaters and beanies branded with a “Mountain Mammoth” logo unveiled nine months ago, losing their minds over a team that didn’t exist two years ago. They flash “Tusks Up” with their hands. And to think that all this newness sprouted from the husk of the financially floundering Arizona Coyotes...
...Earlier that afternoon, Smith pulled up a chair beside his wife, Ashley, and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman for a news conference at Rice-Eccles Stadium, where the Utes play, to announce it as the site of the 2027 Winter Classic. Bettman began: “If I would have suggested such an announcement three years ago, people would have thought we were making it up.”
In the front row, Mendenhall, the Democrat mayor, sat beside Cox, the Republican governor. Growing up in rural Utah, Cox said, the only thing that brought Utahns together was the Jazz — a bond strong enough to overcome religious differences, party lines or college rivalries. He hears echoes of that in the way fans have embraced the Mammoth.
Robbins, who has run the Utah Sports Commission since it was founded in 2000, has worked with five gubernatorial administrations on his organization’s efforts to rebrand Utah as “the state of sport.” Had Cox, like some of his predecessors, not shared Robbins’ view of sports franchises as strategic state assets, the story told about Salt Lake City’s sports scene ahead of the Olympics’ return might read more like a cautionary tale.
In early 2024, when Smith was deep in discussions to buy the Coyotes’ hockey assets, he was considering relocating both the Jazz and the potential NHL expansion franchise south along the Wasatch Front, where Smith Entertainment Group would build a new, custom-fit arena closer to the state’s population center in Utah County. Almost all sports owners want a sports-and-entertainment district — a veritable cash cow — around their venue; and, as with The Battery in the Atlanta suburbs, space is more plentiful and less costly outside the city. In Utah, officials faced the prospect of having several franchises in the southern suburbs — Smith’s NHL and NBA teams in Draper, the Millers’ MLS and NWSL clubs in Sandy and the Triple-A Bees in South Jordan — and none left in Salt Lake City itself.
“This is what gave me sleepless nights,” Derek Miller says.
The future of the Utah sports scene was sealed in one legislative session in 2024. Lawmakers, with the backing of the L.D.S. Church, passed a bill granting Smith Entertainment Group up to $900 million to create a sports-and-entertainment district around the Delta Center. Another $900 million bill to fund stadium construction at the Power District will be triggered if Utah gets an MLB team. As part of the agreements struck then, the Jazz and Mammoth will stay in Salt Lake City for at least 30 years...
...It no longer requires squinting to see Salt Lake City as a big-league market. It now ranks as the 27th-largest U.S. media market, up seven spots in the past decade and ahead of current MLB markets Pittsburgh, Baltimore, San Diego, Kansas City, Cincinnati and Milwaukee. A club in Utah would fill a gap in MLB’s geographic footprint — a Mountain West partner to sit between Las Vegas and Denver — without out cannibalizing an existing market...
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