Where Sport Meets the Sea: How We Helped Bring Big Goals to Miami Beach

East of Collins Expediting  ·  Special Events

Some events are fun. Some events matter. The best ones are both.

This summer, as the world’s attention turns to South Florida for one of the most celebrated sporting tournaments on the planet, Miami Beach became home to something quietly extraordinary — a large-scale public art installation that used the language of soccer to tell a deeper story about the ocean that surrounds this city.

We’re proud to have played a part in making it happen.

About REEFLINE

REEFLINE is one of Miami Beach’s most ambitious and visionary nonprofit initiatives — a 501(c)(3) organization building a seven-mile underwater public sculpture park and hybrid reef running parallel to the shore of Miami Beach.

Founded by cultural placemaker Ximena Caminos and masterplanned in collaboration with renowned architect Shohei Shigematsu of OMA, REEFLINE sits at the intersection of art, science, and marine conservation. Its underwater installations — large-scale sculptures cast in marine-grade concrete and seeded with living coral — are designed to double as hybrid reefs, actively restoring a stretch of the Florida Reef Tract that has lost 90 percent of its coral cover since the 1970s.

This is not a passive art project. It is functioning ecological infrastructure — disguised as something beautiful.

Big Goals: The Activation

This summer, REEFLINE brought its mission to the surface — literally — with an on-land public activation called Big Goals.

Running June 14–28 on the beach between 11th and 12th Streets along Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, Big Goals transformed the sand into a monumental public pitch — featuring oversized sculptural soccer goals with hand-crocheted nets crafted by weavers in Argentina using reclaimed textiles. The installation was created by PLAYLAB INC. as part of the Miami Host Committee’s “One Game, One Passion” legacy program, presented by Uber.

Open and free to all. No tickets. No barriers. Just a beachside pitch where anyone could walk up, play, and learn something about the ocean while they did it.

Weekend programming — running Fridays through Sundays from 10 AM to 3 PM — brought sustainability activations, ocean literacy education, and community engagement to life alongside the installation. Miami Beach Parks & Recreation Summer Camps joined in, with children from across the city playing on the pitch alongside what REEFLINE calls Team Ocean.

The concept was as elegant as it was purposeful: use the global excitement of the world’s most-watched sporting event to draw people toward a conversation about ocean conservation. Sport as a gateway. Play as education.

Where East of Collins Came In

Behind every great activation is a permit. And behind a great permit is a team that understands how to navigate a jurisdiction without slowing down the vision.

East of Collins Expediting handled the special event permitting for Big Goals — coordinating with the City of Miami Beach to ensure the installation was fully approved, compliant, and ready to open on schedule. That includes navigating beach access requirements, temporary structure authorizations, and the layered municipal coordination that an activation of this scale and location demands.

What makes special event permitting in Miami Beach particularly complex — and why partners like REEFLINE trust EOC to handle it — is the number of stakeholders involved. Ocean Drive and Lummus Park sit at the intersection of multiple jurisdictional considerations: city parks, beach access, coastal regulations, and the logistical weight of a globally visible event footprint.

Getting a structure permitted on the sand, in time, without disruption to the public or the beach environment — that’s the kind of coordination that looks effortless from the outside. It never is.

Our team also had the privilege of experiencing Big Goals firsthand — stepping onto the pitch, taking in the installation, and seeing the kind of community energy that good permitting makes possible.

Why This Partnership Matters to Us

East of Collins Expediting operates across the full spectrum of what South Florida builds, activates, and celebrates. Our work spans construction permitting, business licensing, right-of-way coordination, and special event permitting — and in each category, the clients we’re most proud to serve are the ones doing something that means something.

REEFLINE is that kind of partner. Their work is not just culturally significant — it is environmentally necessary. And their ability to translate a complex conservation mission into public art that draws thousands of people to a beach and gets children playing, learning, and asking questions about the ocean they live next to? That’s a rare thing.

We don’t take lightly the role we play in activations like this. A permit isn’t paperwork. It’s permission for something meaningful to exist in the world. And when the thing being permitted is a free, public, ocean-literacy installation on one of the most iconic stretches of beach in the country, during one of the most-watched sporting events in history — we feel that weight.

We’re glad we could help bring it to life.

East of Collins Expediting handles special event permitting, construction permits, business licensing, and right-of-way coordination across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties.

Municipalities served include Miami Beach, City of Miami, Sunny Isles Beach, Aventura, Bal Harbour, Surfside, Coral Gables, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, and 80+ jurisdictions across South Florida.