Spokane Sports

For a city its size, Spokane punches well above its weight on sport. The Spokane Chiefs play major junior hockey in the WHL at the downtown arena and reached the Western Conference final in 2025–26. The Spokane Indians offer about as good an outdoor family evening as you will find, out at Avista Stadium in the Northwest League. And Spokane Velocity FC brought professional soccer back to the city in 2024, playing at the new ONE Spokane Stadium downtown.

Four colleges and universities call Spokane home — the Gonzaga Bulldogs, the Eastern Washington Eagles, the Whitworth Pirates and the Community Colleges of Spokane Sasquatch — and high school sport is followed seriously here, particularly since ONE Spokane Stadium opened in 2023.

But two events define the sporting year, and both of them fill the streets.

Bloomsday

If any single event signals the start of spring in Spokane, it is the thousands of people who start training for Bloomsday.

As soon as people are confident the snow has gone and the weather is turning, the running shoes come out. The 12-kilometre race is held the first weekend of May every year.

The Lilac Bloomsday Run was born out of the running boom of the late 1970s, first run in 1977. May 2026 marked its 50th running, and it remains one of the largest timed road races in the country. Nearly 44,000 people registered for the anniversary race and about 38,000 crossed the finish line.

Among those runners are elementary school students, high school track teams, families walking the course together, people in their eighties doing it for the first time, world-class wheelchair athletes, joggers pushing strollers and some of the best distance runners in the world. The race attracts just about everyone, which is exactly the point of it.

The 12K — 7.46 miles — starts downtown, runs west along the river past Spokane Falls Community College, crosses back over, climbs the infamous Doomsday Hill, and finishes near the courthouse on the north bank of the Spokane River by Riverfront Park.

There is also a junior version, now called America’s Kids Run, held a few weeks earlier in April in a more controlled setting for younger children. Thousands of four to twelve year olds run or walk a course from half a mile up to two miles, making it one of the largest children’s running events anywhere.

Hoopfest

On the last weekend of June, tens of thousands of people take over nearly every downtown street, parking lot and corner of Riverfront Park to play three-on-three basketball.

There are children’s brackets, family teams, co-ed brackets, men’s and women’s brackets, six-foot-and-over brackets, elite teams and a wheelchair division. Hoopfest has grown from 2,000 players in its first year to more than 25,000, across some 6,000 teams on 450 courts spanning 45 city blocks.

Add 3,000 volunteers and upwards of 225,000 spectators, and the whole of downtown effectively becomes a basketball court for two days. It is the largest three-on-three tournament in the world.

There are no words that quite do justice to how well it is organised. People come from across the region to watch and to play. Bloomsday may be Spokane’s most famous event, but Hoopfest has become its most popular.

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