A balance act when it comes to promoting Marshall events
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In my opinion, the Eats and Beats events held on Third Street in downtown Marshall this summer were widely welcomed by the community.
Eats and Beats was held every Thursday 6-8 p.m. for five weeks. It featured a variety of food and drink vendors and live music. Tables were placed on Third Street as well so people could sit down, have a few drinks with some food and enjoy the music.
And the music was pretty good, provided by Jake Nelson, Kayla Daniels, Danica Michaels, Buffalo Alice and The Penny Peaches.
By the time I got out of the office, I was getting to Third Street at the tail end of Eats and Beats. But I was impressed by the number of families enjoying the event. Adults and children were having a good time.
I'm not sure who came up with the Eats and Beats concept, but I know who provided most of the organizing. Cassi Weiss is director of Visit Marshall and is in charge of managing events at the Red Baron Arena, sports events at the ballfields and other events held within the city. Besides the planning, there is all the marketing.
And Weiss gets a lot of help from Red Baron and Expo Senior Sales Manager Adri DeBoer.
As we head down the homestretch of 2027, I decided it would be a good idea to reach out to Weiss for a visit. Is 2026 shaping up to be a successful year for events? And how are hotel receipts doing?
As we talked inside the conference room inside the arena on Thursday, she shared there will be more Eats and Beats Thursdays next summer. However, she didn't have any numbers to share on hotel receipts, but I did look back the Independent story on her 2025 report to the Marshall City Council last December.
"We wanted to really focus on our current events that we were hosting and the community was hosting and really make them the best that they could be," Weiss told the council. "We clearly saw growth across all of our events, which was wonderful, because 2024 was a really hard year for events."
On Thursday, she didn’t have numbers to share, but gave her best assessments.
"Number wise, like we don’t get our lodging tax until three months after the month actually happens," Weiss told me. "So right now we’re collecting lodging tax on like June. So it’s hard to like definitely say hotel stays are up just because we don’t have that data quite yet, but I would say overall, yes. Like just being around on a weekend, I mean you can see, and then just knowing the number of tournaments that we’ve had, the number of events we’ve had on the weekends, I mean there is a lot going on almost every weekend in Marshall."
Here are some of the highlights of the interview:
On the Red Baron Arena
I asked Weiss on the overall impact the arena had on Marshall since it first opened.
"It's hard for me to say because I wasn’t in this role when the arena opened,” she said. “But I would say it had a huge (impact). I don’t know if it was a turning point, but it definitely gave us the opportunity to be a tourism destination in the winter. We were already a sports tourism destination in the spring, the summer, and the fall with our baseball, volleyball, softball, with all of that. So then, when this was built, it gave hockey and figure skating the opportunity to kind of be able to host better tournaments, and have a better facility to be able to host those.”
Sounds of Summer
"So we sit on their committee for Sounds of Summer, and we help them with all their marketing. So, like their website is built into ours. So we manage and update their website and help them with social media marketing too. And then obviously, we help them with additional marketing as it is a big weekend in our community. A lot of it is people who used to live here coming back for maybe a class reunion, but also you know family of people who live in town that are coming back. But it does bring in a lot of people to our community," she said. "I think August is our busiest month. If you go back the last four years, August is our biggest month of hotel stays. And so I think that’s a testament to the fair And Sounds of Summer.”
Sporting events
"This last year we had a goal to try to expand some of our tournaments that already happen here. So every month we try to meet with a new sports association or group who hosts a tournament and talk with them about what the challenges are to expanding that tournament and see if there are ways we can help. And we have a grant available right now to any local organization that does expand their tournament," Weiss said. "With that, we also went to the YMCA and kind of pitched them the idea of trying to do a half marathon, something a little bit bigger than just a 5K that we felt like would bring people to town and probably stay overnight, and that we did this last August, and it was a huge success."
Weiss said 75 runners participated in the half marathon, including a runner from Las Vegas.
"Which was a really cool story. She was running a half or a full marathon in every state, and she asked ChatGPT where she should run in Minnesota, and she found our half marathon. So really cool, and that was just like that one person made the event all worth it," she said.
I jokingly asked what about a full marathon.
"I don’t think we’re quite there yet. We have too many railroad tracks in this town. That’s our issue with the half," Weiss said. "So we started it here (Red Baron Arena). You take the Camden Trail out to Channel Parkway. Well, once you hit Channel Parkway, you hit a railroad track. And so you can’t go any further. So we actually need to find about a quarter mile more somewhere in town that people can run."
Weiss said Visit Marshall would like to find more events to fill the slower months of January, February, March and April "a little bit."
"You know we’re an outside sports community, other than volleyball, so there’s not a lot you can do outside during that time. We have a few volleyball tournaments during that time, and we have a few hockey tournaments during that time. Now this year in 2027, we were awarded a regional and a state tournament for hockey. So those are both in February. So that will help our February numbers a lot. But that’s not an annual thing, and we really want to try to add these annual things that just keep every you know every year after year, keep people coming back,” she said.
Weiss credits the local groups that run the various tournaments, saying they "do an incredible job doing it,” and that's what keeps people coming back.
“And our facilities too. We have incredible facilities that people want to come back for. The Red Baron being probably our best facility. I mean, you go to any hockey rink in the state of Minnesota, and you’re not going to find a video board that does that. That’s playing replay during a youth tournament. I think we just have the right people, the right facilities, and we just do a really good job. And so, once people come here, they’re going to come back,” she said.
I asked if we have enough hotel beds to accommodate the current number sporting events and if more are added.
"I would say right now we have just enough beds. If we want to grow, we’re going to need more," she said. "Our problem is, if our hotels are full, you have to stay 30 minutes (away), and it’s not like metro 30 minutes. So metro people, when they come down here and they think, oh, it’s only 30 minutes away, it’s cornfield 30 minutes, and that’s a little different than a metro 30 minutes. So they don’t really like that."
Different types of events
"We’ve really tried to emphasize the number or the types and numbers of events that we host as well. So, you know, I think I just did our calendar for 2027. I want to say we had like 15 events on there throughout the year. So we’ve really been trying to, you know, diversify the number the events that we do from date wise to what kind of events are they," she said. "We just took over the craft and vendor show that will happen next Saturday. So we have that twice a year now. We just got done with the Arts and Living History Festival, Prairie Jam, Eats and Beats ... We’re doing a dinner theater, so we’re really trying to figure out what are the different unique types of events that we can do that will drive tourism to Marshall, you know, and also give people something to do when they are here too.”
Prairie Jam concert
I attended last month's Prairie Jam concert held at the Arena featuring Slamabama. It was a good show put on by a very talented cover band. And the best part -- tickets only cost $10.
Past Prairie Jam concerts were held at the Schwan Regional Event Center at Southwest Minnesota State University campus. They featured Lauren Alaina, Eli Young Band and Tyler Farr. There was no concert in 2025 before it returned, this time at the arena.
What happened in 2025 and why at the arena this time?
"So we just needed to look at how we could do things differently. It just wasn’t making sense. The amount of work that it was. It was astronomical for a staff of two people who do, you know 87 other things. So we needed to figure out a new concept that would be a lot less work. And this new concept was a lot less work, and it was really great," she said.
Weiss said she didn't know what to expect at the Slamabama concert. It was held with half of the arena space. There was seating on one side, the VIP space upstairs and the rest of the concert goers were able to roam from the beverages stand to the stage. It was actually a cozy atmosphere.
“We had done it one way, and so to bring something back a different way, you just never know how people are going to respond. And the community responded really well to that. And we were able to figure out a way to do it that makes sense for us, where it’s bringing people to town, and it it’s financially makes sense, right?" she said.
Weiss called this year's Prairie Jam the biggest win of the year and she expects the upcoming craft show to be another success story.
She was disappointed with the Living History Festival that was held last weekend.
"That is an event that we get a lot of foot traffic from the farmers market, and it rained, so we had to move it inside to the Red Baron. I try to look at the positive, and we had more people out here at the Red Baron than if we would have set up in the rain outside. And we were a lot happier as vendors and people working the event because we were dry and we weren’t outside in the rain, but the weather just really destroyed that one,” she said.
With all that being said, I believe it's safe to say that Weiss and DeBoer do a fantastic job promoting Marshall facilities and events. On top of her Visit Marshall duties, I'm well aware Weiss is a successful girls hockey coach. How does she balance marketing and coaching?
"It’s (hockey) my passion. I make it work. What I love is when we have a road bus game, I will sit on my laptop, and you know, nowhere is really less than an hour, and I can get two, three hours worth of work done. My bus trip flies by because I’m working. So I get my best work done on a hockey bus," she said. "I put my headphones in. I’m like in my own world … So yeah, it it balances."
So that's the secret to all the planning to promote Marshall as destination place. Just put on the headphones and take a bus trip.