Dick's Sporting Goods Inc

Good day, and welcome to the Dick's Sporting Goods Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Nate Goetz, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss our third quarter 2021 results. On today's call will be Ed Stack, our Executive Chairman, Lauren Hobart, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Navdeep Gupta, our Chief Financial Officer. A playback of today's call will be archived on our Investor Relations website, located at investors.dix.com. for approximately 12 months. As a reminder, we will be making forward-looking statements which are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. Any such statements should be considered in conjunction with cautionary statements in our earnings release and risk factor discussions in our filings with the SEC, including our last annual report on Form 10-K and cautionary statements made during this call. We assume no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements or information. Please refer to our investor relations website to find a reconciliation of any non-GAAP financial measures referenced in today's call. And finally, a few admin items. First, a note on our same-store sales reporting practices. Our consolidated same-store sales calculation includes stores that we temporarily closed last year as a result of COVID-19. The method of calculating comp sales varies across the retail industry, including the treatment of temporary store closures because of COVID-19. Accordingly, our method of calculation might not be the same as other retailers. Next, as a reminder, due to the uneven nature of 2020, we planned 2021 off of a 2019 baseline. Accordingly, we will compare 2021 sales and earnings results against both 2019 and 2020. And lastly, for your future scheduling purposes, we are tentatively planning to publish our fourth quarter 2021 earnings results before the market opens on March 8th, 2022, with our subsequent earnings call at 10 a.m. Eastern time. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Ed.

Thanks, Nate. Good morning, everyone. We're extremely pleased to announce another very strong quarter in which we delivered significant sales and earnings growth over both last year and 2019. I'd like to thank all of our teammates for their hard work and commitment to Dick's Sporting Goods, which helped make this performance possible. Our strategies continue to work as we reimagine the athlete experience in our core business and with the new concepts. We've driven strong, profitable growth at Dick's, and earlier this year we launched two Dick's House of Sports stores, highly experiential destinations that are redefining sports retail. The innovations we've made in our Gulf Galaxy business are performing extremely well, and our second public land store recently opened, focusing on the outdoor activity. As Lauren will discuss earlier, we've joined forces with Nike in a first-of-its-kind partnership that will deepen our strategic relationship and further differentiate Dick's in the marketplace. Looking ahead, I couldn't be more excited about the future of Dick's Sporting Goods, We now expect to deliver comp sales of over 20% for 2021 and remain very confident in the long-term prospects of our business. I'll now turn the call over to Lauren.