Two of the Gulf Coast’s most reliable family outings, the Boat Show on the Bay in Mobile and Blue Wahoos baseball in Pensacola, share more than a kid-first attitude. Both were built, deliberately, around the idea that a family event succeeds when the youngest guests have as much to do as the adults.
A Boat Show Born From a Canceled Season
Boat Show on the Bay, now a fixture at the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park, traces its start to 2021, when pandemic cancellations wiped out nearly every Gulf Coast boat show. Dustin Jackson, who owns EZN Detail and Storage and EZN Outfitters in Saraland, saw a problem worth solving: a big chunk of his outfitter’s fishing and apparel business happened at boat shows, and dealers across the region were losing their best sales window.
Madison Richey of Bay Shore Strategies, who helps organize and manage the event, recalls the phone call that started it. Jackson called her while she was home with the flu and asked a question that sounded half-crazy: was she sitting down, because he thought they should hold a boat show in the EZN Outfitters parking lot in eight weeks. He phoned a few boat dealers to test interest, and within the first two hours every dealer and vendor he contacted wanted in.
By the end of that same day, they had met with the director of Battleship Park, who agreed to host. With only eight weeks to pull off the biggest event either had ever organized, the first show came together, and park staff told the team they had never seen a more organized and efficient operation. “It absolutely changed our trajectory,” Richey said. “We felt unstoppable.”
“It was a skeleton of what it is today,” she said of that first year. The show now fills the entire Battleship Park area with roughly ten boat dealers and more than 100 vendors selling apparel, fishing gear and boating equipment, alongside food trucks, live music on the main stage, and a full slate of activities for children.
The Kids’ Zone Is the Point
Kid-focused entertainment is the heart of the event. The Kid’s Zone features inflatables and a foam party pit, where a machine blows bubbles and children run through them, a sight parents find irresistible for photos. Once Upon a Time, a real-life princess party with costumed actors, wanders the grounds interacting with children, joined by superheroes, and many kids arrive dressed as their favorite characters. Sunshine the Clown, a local fixture for many years, remains a favorite.
Four-legged visitors get their own spotlight with the Mutti Gras Dog Costume Contest, in which costumed dogs perform tricks and compete in several categories before a panel of judges, with trophies for the winners. The show’s schedule has also long honored the community around it, with a dedicated Military and First Responders Day offering discounted admission, free entry for children 10 and under, and $15 daily tickets that include parking. Yamaha has served as presenting sponsor, and the event’s organizers like to note the obvious: where better for a boat show than the home of the biggest boat on the bay?
Baseball’s Smallest Market, Biggest Turnout
Across the state line in Pensacola, the Blue Wahoos have turned the same kid-first philosophy into a business model. The Double-A club plays in the smallest market in its league yet posts the league’s best attendance, a fact the front office attributes to entertainment as much as baseball. “We sell the fun, not just baseball,” says Tyler Johnson, a Pensacola native and corporate sales executive who played at LBW Community College and earned his sports management degree from Troy University before joining the Wahoos in 2020.
The numbers back him up. The waterfront stadium, with a little over 5,000 seats, carries more than 1,800 season ticket holders, sellouts on most Thursday-through-Sunday games, and awards from Baseball Digest for Best Ballpark and the Ballpark with the Most Beautiful View. Sunday Family Nights feature kids running the bases after the game, with squishy baseballs for participants; anywhere from 250 to 500 children run the bases on a given night.
Friday promotions run deep, with a dozen giveaway nights a season, including military mascot bobbleheads and races among mascots dressed as the five military branches. The Roach Run, in which hundreds of kids chase a roach mascot across the field, remains a signature gag. The team’s ownership group, assembled by Quint and Rishy Studer, includes golfer Bubba Watson and Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker Derrick Brooks, and the Studers remain closely involved, Johnson said, investing in the team, the players and the employees.
The stadium’s impact extends past the season. It hosts the Soul Bowl youth football games each off-season, a March college baseball tournament for visiting Wisconsin teams, and community movie nights, and it has anchored the resurgence of Pensacola’s downtown waterfront. For families on the Gulf Coast, the lesson from both venues is the same: the kids’ zone, the mascots and the post-game base running are not extras. They are the product.