Carrow's team lost out to the Chungcheong Megacity bid from South Korea for the hosting rights as the latter received 14 of the 21 votes.

"We have already been contacted by other major events that have heard about our bid," Carrow told The Sports Examiner.

"They know that North Carolina brought its 'A' game, and if these other events want to come to North Carolina, they will get our 'A' game, too - plus an incredible array of facilities both for sport competition/training and for participant accommodations and dining, all within a super convenient event footprint."

Carrow was optimistic about how close they came to securing the Games given the amount of stakeholders involved in the bid as it tried to bring together five different cities and counties.

North Carolina was also a candidate for the 1993 edition but lost out to fellow United States' location Buffalo.

"We have 19 universities within the region, and we had already committed to activities on 13 of them," Hill continued.

"So, you can imagine that those are a lot of little 'kingdoms', and for everybody to be willing to drop the provincialism and be willing to pull together, because they realise that a team is much more than the sum of the individual parts, and really represent our state and country so well, we couldn’t be more proud of that.

"That will pay major dividends without a doubt."

FISU President Eric Saintrond said that he hopes the state will be able to stage a future edition of the Games, possibly as soon as 2029.

He claimed that "everything is there" for North Carolina's bid but it simply could not match the financial power of the South Korean bid which had the national Government behind it.