Kansas City’s Kathy Nelson Knows When to Be a Band Director
By Jordan Bradley
As the head of both Kansas City’s destination management organization, Visit Kansas City, and its sports tourism bureau, the Greater Kansas City Sports Commission, Kathy Nelson, a native Kansas Citian, is feeling all the feelings as the Missouri city hosts 2026 FIFA World Cup teams and matches.
“It’s exhilarating, it’s exhausting, it’s exciting,” Nelson told USAE. “All the words you can think of when you’ve ever worked on something larger than life. I feel pressure, I feel joy, I feel nervous—but I can’t stop smiling.”
The city and its stakeholders have been preparing to showcase KC on a world stage for more than a decade, Nelson said.
“Now that it’s here, everyone else is experiencing what we’ve known and what we’ve been working on, and the excitement of welcoming the world to our city,” she said, adding that “every day, I wake up thinking that the impact that we are having for the next decade—for the next fifty years—is something that I played a role in.”
Sitting at the helm of both organizations, Nelson said, is a bit like being a band director at times: “I need the flute section to be ready for this, I need the drum section to be prepared, and right now, we’re all playing together in a symphony.”
That coordination and synchronization is a requirement of pulling off the role of host city for the World Cup, Nelson said.
“It has to work well to welcome the world’s largest sporting event, so running both organizations—and I say this often—they don’t really need me,” Nelson explained.
“You hire great people around you and they’re doing incredible things. I’m here to firefight for them. I’m here to be the band director at times. I’m here to make connections and figure out how we can lift everyone – not just the work that we’re doing, but lift our city, lift our region to have this expansion of what people think about Kansas City.”
The work of hosting such large, city-wide events requires a leader to be able to pivot, something Nelson learned earlier in her illustrious career.
Nelson pursued a degree in television and radio, and went to work straight out of college at her hometown TV station, WDAF TV in Kansas City. She spent 12 years working in broadcast news and she “loved every minute of it, loved the challenges.”
Sports have always been an integral part of life and career for Nelson.
After her first gig in local news, Nelson and a couple of colleagues in the late 90s/early aughts formed their own small cable sports television station—“the first of its kind in the country”—called Metro Sports, which focused on high school sports, she told USAE. The station was operated and owned by Time Warner Cable, and over time, Nelson began to travel to other cities to launch Metro Sports affiliates.
Meanwhile, in her personal life, Nelson was a dedicated volunteer for events at the Kansas City Marathon, which the sports commission owned and operated. Over time, she “started to know people there,” she said, and was asked to serve on a board to help launch a women’s sports program known as the Women’s Intersport Network (WIN) for KC, established in 1994.
In 2010, the then-CEO Kevin Gray of the Kansas City Sports Commission reached out to Nelson and asked her to run the WIN for KC program. The following year, just six months after Nelson joined the org, Gray unexpectedly passed away, and the commission’s board asked Nelson to step into the role of president and CEO for the Sports Commission.
Ten years later, the board of directors for Visit KC approached her with the same offer, but Nelson wasn’t ready to let go of the Sports Commission, as her heart is “in all things sports.”
In order to test the idea of a dual-CEO, Nelson said she and a group of board members and staff from the Kansas City organizations went to Cleveland to interview Dave Gilbert, President and CEO of both Destination Cleveland and the Greater Cleveland Sports Commission, and his staff to discern whether it was feasible for Nelson and Kansas City to follow such an unconventional leadership model.
“And then we practiced [the idea at] the end of 2021,” Nelson said. “I wanted to make sure my sports commission staff was okay with the concept of me sharing my attention.”
It went well enough that on January 2, 2022, Nelson began leading both organizations. Functionally, she has an employment contract with the KC Sports Commission, she told USAE, and then the pair of orgs have a contract “between themselves, where Visit KC shares resources, attention and time of the CEO.”
And how has it been going?
“So it actually is working, and it’s only working because I have the most unbelievable staff on both sides,” Nelson said. “If I ever left—which I don’t see myself leaving anytime soon—I would take all these people with me because I cherish every one of them.”
For Nelson to be leading two entities feels appropriate, given that she grew up with two parents who were “servant leaders” throughout her formative years: her father was president of the Trans World Airlines (now American Airlines) Employees Club and her mother worked in human resources for larger companies.
Watching her parents navigate leadership impressed upon Nelson the importance of leaders and showed her that “one leader can make a difference—and that difference can be so small that no one knows about it—for me, it’s when I see someone on my staff, making sure I know their name and I recognize them, and talk about what they did the day before. I call people out in staff meetings and just make sure people feel my heart more than anything and how much I care. I care about our city, but I really care about the people.”
Nelson is also a “big believer in culture,” she said.
“Tourism drives the culture of a city, and as a leader, I take that very serious,” Nelson said. “I think that from external relationship, internal relationships, making connections—tourism is such a powerful engine for a market and a city that it is so critical that the leader of a tourism organization and a sports tourism organization is not only passionate about the city, but shows up and helps drive culture, supports the mayor, supports the city council, supports the governors on driving the culture of a community.”
Over the last 15 years, Kansas City has become “so dramatically different,” Nelson said.
“Eleven years ago, we made this dramatic decision that we are going to bid on and get serious about the FIFA World Cup,” she said. “That dramatic decision has made this dramatic result, and we’re hosting the world.”
As Nelson prepared to host the FIFA World Cup, she attended the annual Big Slick Celebrity Weekend on May 31. Kansas City native and Modern Family actor Eric Stonestreet said something that resonated with Nelson: “People ask, “Is Kansas City ready?’” Nelson recalled. “‘The question should be, ‘Is the world ready for Kansas City?’”