ABOVE: Welcome native, Tracy Tish, is serving as Chief of Staff for the upcoming 2026 Special Olympics USA Games, which will be held in Minnesota. Submitted photo.

WELCOME – After around 30 years of planning projects for companies like Accenture and U.S. Bank, A man from Welcome has his last big project for a major sporting event.

Tracy Tish was born and raised in Welcome and graduated from Welcome High School before it became part of Martin County West. He then continued his education at Bethel University and started his career at Accenture after graduating.

“Most of my career I spent working on very big projects,” he said. “As a leader of a large IT project, I’m not really writing code or doing detailed analysis and testing with technology. It’s more about arranging the resources, those resources being people, venues, technology, whatever. All those resources are needed to come together simultaneously and deliver a result.”

Minnesota was selected as the host of the 2026 USA Special Olympics in 2022 on May 6, 2022, nearly four years ago. Following the announcement, Tish was contacted by Christy Sovereign, CEO of the 2026 USA Special Olympics.

“She reached out to me to see if I was interested in taking the role as her chief of staff,” he said. “I have a world of respect for Christy, and once I knew that she was the CEO of something this important, it was an easy decision for me.”

This easy decision stemmed from a love of sports and the desire to give back in this manner at the end of his career.

“I’ve bicycled across the USA from Pacific to Atlantic,” Tish said. “I live in Colorado, so sports, outdoors and activities has always been very important to me. As a ski instructor, I organize a collection of my fellow ski instructors to work every year as volunteers at the Colorado State Special Olympics Winter Games. We teach intellectually disabled youth how to ski.”

As the Chief of Staff, Tish said he is responsible for the operations of Sovereign’s team and their day-to-day activities.

“Putting on these games is effectively a great, big project,” he said. “It’s a lot of planning, a lot of coordinating. There’s all sorts of different organizations operating in support of the games. There’s sponsorship that has to be acquired, and we have two different sites that we have to coordinate. Our athletic events are being held at the University of Minnesota and the National Sports Center in Blaine.”

So far, Tish said one of the most challenging things has been pulling together the different skill sets needed to deliver the games.

“We have an events team, sports team, background operations team, marketing team,” he said. “These people don’t report to me, per se, but part of my role is to make sure that they operate in a coordinated fashion.”

Carrying from his experiences in Colorado, Tish said by far the most rewarding part has been helping to create the experience the athletes get to have in Minnesota.

“I can see the impact these games are going to have on the 3,500 or so athletes who are going to be participating,” he said. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event, and it’s important to us that we use it as a platform for awareness of the Special Olympics mission. It would be one thing just to hold a very successful Special Olympics Games, but we also recognize that it’s an opportunity and a platform to increase awareness of the Special Olympics mission throughout the Upper Midwest community.”

While this mission includes representation of athletic achievement, it goes far beyond that.

“A huge percentage of intellectually disabled folks in our community are either unemployed or underemployed,” Tish said. “What we’re going to do is showcase opportunities for them where they can contribute and how we can make employers in the Upper Midwest area aware of the opportunities presented to give these folks a chance.”

As the games are only a little over two months away, Tish said now it is all about making sure everything they’ve planned comes together cohesively.

“You step back and look at the scale of things,” he said. “We’re going to have around 3,500 athletes, plus another 1,000 support people for those athletes, all of whom we will be hosting and feeding at the University of Minnesota. Step back even further, we have 20,000 distinct volunteer shifts we need to pull off the games, everything from the medical volunteers to just simple things, like people who are monitoring activities in each of the venues.”

While this is his last big project, Tish still has plenty of things he wishes to do in his retirement.

“I will continue to do things that I love,” he said. “The Special Olympics Colorado, volunteering and things like that will be a big part of my life going forward.”

For more information on the Special Olympics, including volunteer opportunities, visit 2026specialolympicsusagames.org/