Question: Wide World of Sports hosts everything from cheerleaders' events to X Games to paint-ball meets to enormous softball and basketball tournaments. What sports do you enjoy watching?

Answer: My favorite sport overall is wrestling, only because that's what I did both in high school and college, and what I've got both of my young sons involved in right now. That being said, a couple weeks ago I went to the Special Olympics and found that to be just fascinating, both with the passion of the athletes but also the incredible time that was given by the volunteers and the expertise they delivered.

Q: The newly announced bowling stadium for the United States Bowling Congress brings you into a whole new sport. What will this stadium, and the addition of bowling, do for Walt Disney World?

A: It'll be our 54th sport, which is very exciting, because diversity of sports is part of our growth strategy. Bowling, when you talk about the most popular sports in America, bowling typically is No..1 from a participants' perspective. The ability to host the USBC's bowling tournaments here drives enormous value to the community, and to Disney. My understanding is the men's tournament will have in excess of 80,000 actual participants in the tournament. Not just spectators, but participants, and it'll take five months for us to actually hold that tournament.

Q: Will the bowling lanes be open to the public for recreational bowling when there aren't tournaments?

A: That's our plan, yes.

Q: What's the status of the Jostens Center [a new, 70,000-square-foot gymnasium]?

A: It's going to open officially on July 5.

Q: When it opens, it will about double your indoor sports space. Does this help you most with attracting additional events, or give you flexibility with events you have, or allow you to go after events that you don't have enough space for now?

A: All of the above, plus it allows us to take events we already have and expand them. The first event we have is an AAU Girls 15-and-under national championship. Whether it's field hockey, whether it's gymnastics, whether it's wrestling, whether it's marshal arts, whether it's archery -- having that kind of space gives us the luxury of great variety and the ability to attract really substantial kinds of events to the complex.

Q: Who's getting these events now -- where's your competition?

A: The competition is scattered all over the country. What's most exciting for me is we have a lot of competitive advantages that other sites don't' have. No..1, we've got location. We're located in the heart of Disney World. Not a bad place to come, if you're an amateur athlete. No..2, with the rebranding of the complex, and the leveraging of the ESPN brand, we're going to be able to create an experience for our athletes and the spectators that come along with them that literally is unparalleled. Imagine the athletes, when they come to our complex to compete, feel they really have made it to the big-time, that they really have made it because now they are competing at the complex and feeling like they've made it onto ESPN. That's a pretty heady competitive advantage for any young athlete.

Q: What can we expect out of the ESPN rebranding? Are we going to see name changes throughout?

A: You're going to see a name change. What you're also going to see, which I think is more important, is we're going to create what we call an immersive experience. We're going to create an experience where when the athlete comes in to compete, they're going to feel like they've made it to the big-time. That there is no place they are able to compete that is sort of more high-end, better facilities, makes them feel more special, and really envelops them in the world-wide leader in sports, that leader being ESPN.

Q: Is the "Wide World of Sports" identity lost on younger generations who never saw the ABC television show, and is that name going to disappear?

A: I think the question on the table is: Does anybody [among] young athletes know the Wide World of Sports brand from the ABC days? I think the answer is: limited. Do they know the Wide World of Sports brand because we've been in business for 11 years as a sports facility? Yes, they do. So we're debating: Should we keep the name? Should we incorporate parts of that name?

Q: Any possibility that the Tampa Bay Rays' schedule might be expanded at Champion Stadium?

A: We love having the Tampa Bay Rays play here. I would love to have them make a longer-term commitment to play here, and to play as many games here as they would like to play.

Q: But?

A: No buts. It's not necessarily my decision.

Q: You were very active with the Year of a Million Dreams Campaigns. As we see the ESPN brand come in, are we going to see that kind promotion applied to the newly named sports complex here?

A: I think that's part of the power of the ESPN Brand. We're looking at ways to create exposure both for the complex itself but also for the athletes competing there. So we're looking at how we can create exposure in ESPN media like print, online, television, radio. The ESPN platform offers us a lot of exposure, and ESPN is very interested in reaching out to amateur athletes, especially youth amateur athletes.

Q: Is the youth/amateur athlete business almost too seasonal to be able to sustain full facilities throughout the year?

A: No, I don't think it's too seasonal. I think there are some things, however, that we need to do a better job of, which is understanding state by state and quite honestly zip code by zip code when kids are out of school and when they're not out of school. We need to be able to counter-program other kinds of events that aren't reliant on kids being out on summer break or vacations or weekends -- things like salsa competitions, things like Disney Channel games, things like the concert business. These are all opportunities for us at the complex, and opportunities we're aggressively looking at.