ORANGEBURG, S.C. — The city of Orangeburg will host the 2024 Diamond Youth Baseball World Series in the last week of July.
The event will have 11 southeast teams, which are expected to bring thousands of people to the city. Local businesses are excited.
Drew Shuler owns North Fork Market + Kitchen. He hopes visitors take time to explore Orangeburg.
“We’re hoping to see a larger increase in our foot traffic here at North Fork and I hope that the folks that are coming to the tournament will drive around our great city and support these small businesses," said Shuler. "Us in particular we are hoping for an increase in lunch traffic and we offer a lot of local and regional specialty foods that folks can also come and pick up and take on the road with them.”
Shuler opened North Fork in February 2023 and said the restaurant is more than prepared for the influx of visitors.
“We are already in the process of figuring out how to handle large crowds as our business grows," said Shuler. "And so we definitely are preparing to have more food in the kitchen to serve as well as our retail shelves in the market.”
Hotels in town are also getting ready to see a stream of guests spend the night.
Latonya Edwards is the general manager of the Orangeburg Comfort Inn & Suites. She said the hotel would not be filled without the tournament.
“Occupancy has been a little bit slow kinda-sorta, so we’re actually excited about them coming in," said Edwards. "They’ll be here July 25 through the 30th; they booked about 30 rooms with us. That’s half of the hotel -- the hotel is only 69 units -- so we’re excited about that. The length of stay is also awesome. I mean, they’re going to be here for five days, so we’re excited to get them in and accommodated.”
Edwards said the additional income helps with operating costs.
“Everything is going up," said Edwards. "The food’s going up we’re having to you know deal with that so with the additional heads in beds as I like to call them, that actually helps generate revenue where we can offset costs in other places.”
City administrator Sidney Evering said this tournament will play a big role in sports tourism.
“We’re trying to increase our sports tourism we feel like we have an excellent second to none complex facility, we have 9 ball fields that were built for purposes like this to host these types of tournaments," said Evering. "This is probably the largest one that we’ll be hosting thus far but hopefully its one of many more to come.”
The opening ceremony will be held on July 25 at 7:30 p.m. at South Carolina State University’s football stadium.