Custom taxonomies

If you want this project, we would need a brief explanation beforehand on how you would solve the task at hand. Our site is a news site covering 3 sports. We have a common front page and separate pages for the sports. Each sport have attributes like athlete, photographer, film maker, brand, sporting event, location, location type and sport tricks attached to them through pictures, videos or articles. It would be perfect if these attributes were different tags belonging to 3 different sport categories, but since Wordpress does not allow tags to be hierarchical we need to find a solution. The attributes should have the possibility of being automatically presented on their own pages under each sport. Two examples: 1. A page for all athletes belonging to sport A, and with under pages showing the individual athlete with all videos, articles and pictures marked with their name, or all the tricks they have done or the locations they have visited. We should also be able to add additional information to these athletes on their under pages. 2. A page for locations on where to do each of the sports with a google map + list of locations on the location page with the possibility of choosing locations based upon type of location, and under pages for each location showing athletes, pictures, videos, articles, tricks etc. that have been done on them, generated automatically. All of the taxonomies should have their own automated presentation page under Sport A, Sport B and Sport C and they should be SEO friendly and searchable. The previous programmer set up a system with a post type for each article for each sport, and proposed to do the same with pictures, picture series etc, and that would have made the admin littered with various post types and not very user friendly. We would like to have the remnants of that implementation removed and replaced with a better system. What we really want is a system with categories (sport) with child categories (athlete, tricks etc) with tags attached to the child categories (name of athlete, name of trick). Is it possible or is there another solution?