Customer Snapshot
- Full-Time Staff: 6
- Flagship Event: Double Bridge Run
- 2026 Race Cap: 4,500 (sold out)
- Events Managed on RunSignup: 40+ annually, road races, tennis, soccer, swimming, & banquets
About Pensacola Sports
Pensacola Sports is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit sports tourism and event management organization in Pensacola, Florida. Director of Events Amy Marquez oversees a wide-ranging event calendar that includes the Double Bridge Run and Bayou Hills Run road races, a charity tennis tournament, a pro tennis tournament, the SEC Soccer Championship and Sun Belt Conference Basketball Tournament, a high school all-star series across six sports, a firefighters challenge, an open water swim, two annual banquets, and summer kids clinics. With a full-time staff of six and a 25-member Board of Directors, Pensacola Sports manages more than 40 events a year, with 10 and growing currently running on RunSignup.
At the center of it all is the Double Bridge Run, a race offering 15K and 5K options that has become a Pensacola tradition. The course starts downtown at the city’s minor league baseball field, crosses the three-mile bridge into Gulf Breeze, climbs the steep Bob Sikes Bridge, and finishes at Pensacola Beach — almost entirely over open water. The race will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2027.
Pensacola Sports moved to RunSignup in 2019, with the Double Bridge Run as its first event on the platform. “We were looking for just a better way overall to get our participants to register — something that was just all-encompassing,” Amy said. “Run Signup really brought that to us, and it was kind of a game changer with how people were registering.”
Double Bridge Run Map
The Challenge: Manual Race-Day Prep and No Room to Grow
Before RunSignup, race-week prep for the Double Bridge Run was almost entirely manual. Staff and a local high school volunteer group hand-labeled roughly 4,000 bibs, pre-assigned bib numbers, and built a printed booklet that was emailed out to registrants ahead of the race. Withdrawals and no-shows meant fielding one-off deferral requests every year, with no consistent policy in place.
The race was also capped by the city at 4,000 runners due to the old two-lane bridge on the course — a hard ceiling that limited growth regardless of demand. And beyond the Double Bridge Run, the team needed a system flexible enough to also run tennis tournaments, banquets, and sports tourism events — not just endurance races.
The Solution: Race Ops Built for a Six-Person Team
Dynamic Bib Assignment
Dynamic bib assignment eliminated the Double Bridge Run’s manual bib process entirely. “The dynamic bib assignments definitely made things a lot easier,” Amy said. “We used to do envelopes and labels — we’d have to go to one of the high schools, have a group help us label about 4,000 bibs, pre-assign those bib numbers, and make a booklet to email out to all the racers ahead of time. Now we don’t have to do any of that. That’s cut at least five steps out of just assigning bib numbers.”
Real-Time Check-In
The check-in feature gives the team visibility into race-day readiness before runners ever arrive. “I like how seamless that is, being able to check people in and see where we are percentage-wise of people who’ve checked in the day before,” Amy said. “Then we have an idea of about how many people are going to be coming on race day, so we’re a little more prepared to facilitate that on race morning, when we only have about an hour before the race starts.”
CheckIn App report
CheckIn App report by time
Race Insurance Instead of Manual Deferrals
On the advice of their race timer, Pensacola Sports turned on race insurance about two years ago — and stopped handling deferrals and refunds manually altogether. “Before that feature, we had a lot of people who wanted to defer their registration, or something came up, and what do we do now?” Amy said. “Now that we have race insurance, we don’t do any deferrals. We tell people the insurance is there — if you didn’t take advantage of it, it kind of puts the responsibility back on the registrant.”
Referral Rewards, Email, and Merchandise Tracking
Referral Rewards, added three to four years ago, has become a steady source of new registrations.
The team also relies on direct email to participants, quick account lookups for runners who can’t remember if they registered, and real-time t-shirt inventory tracking at packet pickup.
Demographic Data as a Marketing Tool
Last year, Pensacola Sports started mining registration demographics for marketing, not just reporting. “We used that as a marketing feature — can we get all 50 states to register?” Amy said. Last year’s campaign brought in registrants from 46 states, plus the UK and Guam, with about half of all participants still coming from the Southeast — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The long-term goal, Amy said, is to be known as a destination race.
A Timer Partnership Powered by RunSignup
Race timer Scott Langford of Trinity Timing has become a de facto extension of the Pensacola Sports team, with direct access to their RunSignup account. “He’s told me about things I haven’t even noticed — features you guys have. He’s like, ‘Hey, you should turn this on, this is what it does,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s cool, let’s do it,'” Amy said. When the race sold out for the first time in 2026 and built a waitlist of more than 200 people, Scott used no-show data to help release additional spots without breaking the 4,500 cap. “He was able to really sit down with us and say, ‘Here’s what’s going on, here’s what I think you should do.’ I trusted him enough to say, do whatever you need to do on the back end to make that configuration work.”
Scott’s team also ran a test livestream of the finish line on YouTube during the 2026 race, syncing each runner’s name to the video as they crossed. “It was kind of cool,” Amy said. “You could see the person coming over, and their name would scroll onto the right side of the screen.”
One Platform, Well Beyond Road Races
For a six-person staff running more than 40 events a year, RunSignup’s flexibility outside of road races has mattered as much as any single feature. “It is diverse enough that it’s not just focused on road races,” Amy said. “There is a way to configure the registration to do other things other than just taking registrations for people running.” Tennis tournaments, soccer tourism events, banquets, and the firefighters challenge all run through the same platform as the Double Bridge Run.
Pensacola Sports has also moved the Double Bridge Run onto RunSignup’s Website V2 platform, with the rest of its event calendar migrating over as each event opens for registration.
The Results: A Sellout, a Waitlist, and Room to Grow
In 2026, the Double Bridge Run sold out at 4,500 registrants — its first sellout since before the pandemic — with a waitlist of more than 200 runners who didn’t get in. For 2027, the 30th anniversary year, Pensacola Sports is raising the cap to 5,000 to meet demand, with plans to keep incrementing it as long as interest holds.
“That’s kind of where we’re aiming, to keep our numbers increasing,” Amy said. “Now that we’ve sold out, we’re going to keep increasing our cap as long as we have the demand.”
Looking Ahead to the 30th Anniversary
Heading into 2027, Pensacola Sports plans to market the finish-line livestream more heavily so more families know they can watch runners cross online, continue migrating its remaining events to Website V2, and explore selling race merchandise through the platform. The team is also digging through old newspaper archives and its prior registration software to piece together 30 years of Double Bridge Run history — including who won the very first race — for the anniversary celebration.
“I think you just have to love what you’re doing,” Amy said, reflecting on what it takes to succeed in event management. “Take the time to really learn about the field, learn from the best, and figure out how to implement that into your own race in your own way.”
