Athletes who changed the game. Moments that changed history.
Discover how sports history IS American history!
OUR TOURS
PLAYMAKERS ON THE MALL
Sports, Power, & American History
From the U.S. Capitol Building to the World War II Memorial, this 2-hour walking tour explores the National Mall through the stories of the athletes and games who made history in DC and around the world. Discover how a Major League catcher became a WWII spy, how a lawsuit over access to public golf cracked open civil rights law, the significance behind six Black Olympic athletes standing in the Oval Office in 1948, and so much more. Discover the incredible sports stories hiding in plain sight!
2 hours | 2.1 walking miles | Start Point: East Front of U.S. Capitol
FROM SHAW TO THE SHOW
A Home Field History of DC Baseball
Begin in Shaw at the site of Griffith Stadium, where the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays of the Negro Leagues shared hallowed ground. Ride the Green Line south through the story of a city that lost its team twice, fought to reclaim its baseball identity, and built a new home on the banks of the Anacostia. From the ghost of Griffith Stadium to the gates of Nationals Park, this is DC’s baseball story - and America’s baseball story - told in the way it deserves.
Approximately 2 hours | Walking & Green Line Metro | Starts at Shaw-Howard U Station
CHANGING THE GAME
How Black Washington’s Athletes Rewrote the Rules
Begin in the neighborhood where Black Washington built its own athletic world of courts, leagues, and institutions that thrived in the face of segregation and produced some of the most consequential figures in American sports history. Walk through the streets where a physical education teacher named Edwin Bancroft Henderson introduced basketball to Black America, where Howard University became the unlikely cradle of HBCU athletic excellence, and where athletes didn’t just play the game - they used it to challenge the laws, customs, and power structures that kept them off the field. This is the story of how Black Washington’s athletes changed their sports, and their country.
Approximately 2 hours | Walking Tour | Starts at Shaw-Howard U Station
ABOUT PLAYMAKER TOURS
Playmaker Tours DC was built on a simple conviction: sports has always been in the room when America defined itself - in its courtrooms, its monuments, its neighborhoods, and its halls of power. Playmaker Tours are not trivia tours. These are history tours that use sports as the way in, because the world of sports is where some of the most important stories in American life actually happened.The idea for Playmaker tours grew out of years of curiosity and digging through museums, archives, and down the kind of rabbit holes that start with one name and are still going three hours later! The more I looked, the more I found extraordinary stories hiding in plain sight, on streets and steps that millions of people walk past every day without knowing the stories that happened there.I’ve called Washington DC home for over a decade, and these tours are my way of shining a light on stories that deserve to be told, and that I believe will resonate with anyone who has ever loved a sport, been a fan, or played a game, and wondered what it all meant.My goal is simple: whether it’s your first time in DC or you’ve lived here for decades, you’ll finish one of. Our tours seeing this city through a completely different lens, carrying stories you would never have found on your own.— Rory, Founder