Or maybe deliberately trying to exclude the poor because too many people have used athletic skills as a way out of poverty.
I was on the board of a scientific society and when hosting a conference it's typical that the society has a contract with the "official" hotel for a number of rooms they have to fill. I'm not sure exactly how the kickbacks worked- I don't think we got money directly but we got use of a number of facilities in the contract we would have had to rent at standard rates otherwise. Of course the special member rate for attendees was not as good as you could find through other discounts.
I went to a conference at Caesars in Las Vegas. Lots more giant statues of topless women than other venues I've scienced at. The day we got a huge discount on the rooms.
I was blessed with children who were reasonably interested in being active, but weren't good enough athletes for serious sports. It's nice to drive a few miles to sit out in the sun and watch a soccer game, but I couldn't have tolerated travel teams.
Plus, sometimes other parents are careless and forget to lock their cars.
I played travel soccer from 7th grade on, and my parents never attended the out-of-town games. It didn't seem like it was expected. They just sent me along with whichever family was gung-ho about taking a bunch of kids.
I feel like this is some sort of parental-workload creep that parents have to drive long distances for games themselves?
I feel like I read a good piece recently condemning the entire travel-team industrial complex, but I can't seem to recall where.
Jammies read that too, I think, and was telling me about it.
This seems insane. Did Babe Ruth's parents drive him to distant suburbs to get drunk and eat hot dogs (his training regimen) with other kids? My friend with a kid in MLB never mentions that stuff: my impression is that that is because the real prospects are swept up into a more professionalized sorting and cultivating system very early. "Travel sports" are for parents' delusions.
I am not a crackpot.
9: I think you're thinking of Anne Helen Peterson's recent essay.
There was a somewhat dubious hockey league that wanted to take over a substantial part of our local ice rink to host a team for 17 - 18 year-olds paying thousands and thousands of dollars for the opportunity to look good for a Division 1 college program. This appeared to be in lieu of actually going to high school.
2: probably the contract with the hotel for lower rates required a certain number of attendees.
Probably had free rooms for the organizers too.
re: 11
Some of my son's friends play football (soccer) quite seriously. Some are in 3 (3!) teams. The distances aren't huge but they parents are expected to take them to games and training. A couple of them play for Championship teams, and two are actively playing for Premier League teams on fixed term trials at the moment. So, these are serious and the equivalent of Flippanter's friend who has a kid in MLB although they are young, so it's still quasi-amateur.
I think for the non-professional teams, the parents ferry the kids everywhere. For the pro teams, the parents are responsible for getting the kids to the training ground, but the rest is all handled by the club.
3 and 14 are right. The organizing group typically gets a certain number of room nights free, in proportion to the number of rooms paid for in their room block (for the organizer's staff, or whatever they want to do with it), plus sometimes other things like upgrades or conference room space. And in exchange for that stuff and the group room rate (putatively at a discount), the organizer also typically has to commit to a particular room block, and if they don't end up filling enough of the block (usually around 80%) they have to pay liquidated damages. So there's often an effort to strong-arm people into the hotel block if it's looking like they might come in short.
Since it's so decentralized and barely overseen it seems like ripe for kickbacks.
I'm on the governing council of my regional scholarly organization, and trying to fill our room block every year is incredibly stressful. We only get one hotel suite free--it usually goes to either program chair or the president--but it lowers our cost for the conference overall.
Travel/select youth sports is a total racket, though. Academic conferences are also a racket, but we try hard to keep ours as affordable as possible.
I'm helping coach a competitive U10 hockey team. It's the 2nd highest level, so they're good and serious, but not 'future NHLer/D1 scholarship' good. I live in Southern Ontario, in the middle of the single densest collection of minor hockey teams on earth. There's easily 300 competitive teams in our age group within a 90 minute drive. Maybe twice that. Setting aside our 2-3 regular season games a week, we could play in a tournament somewhere within 100km almost every weekend.
But the parents really want to go to tournaments in Montreal and New York and Pennsylvania. They grumble when we book tournaments that don't require hotel stays. (We ignore this and book local. I don't want to spend my weekends staying in a hotel with other hockey parents.)
Pennsylvania is so full of assholes.
My son was an OK youth hockey player and I rather liked the tournaments - York, PA! Aberdeen, MD! Pennsauken, NJ! But he stopped in high school because it was ramping up to effectively replace high school.
9: travel-team industrial complex
I sometimes think there must be have been some genius at the Association of Hotel Owners in Unmemorable Places Whose Rooms Would Only be Filled by Business People Forced to be There who laid the groundwork for ramping up the whole concept of travel team sports. But alas, like MAGA the rot was already deeply embedded in the population.
I think I have written before about our shameful over-involvement in the enterprise. Particularly with my youngest and travel soccer.
Some highlights.
Erie PA was a common destination as it was well-placed to attract teams from Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Buffalo (and sometimes Detroit and Toronto*). Hotels were limited and the terms for larger tournaments much like heeb's describes.
One time we had a tournament in the DC area and I was expecting to be shocked by hotel prices and I was cheap and reasonable terms; our tournament was a blip in a place with many, many rooms available. Then the week before it was to take place DC snipers shot someone at a gas station across the street from tournament HQ and the whole thing got called off.
A particularly ridiculous example was an Easter Break tournament in Virginia Beach. (I did not go but my wife did). Hoping for warmth instead an artic blast went through after a big snowstorm and the games were played on 30 degree windy, icy fields. We made it to the finals and played a team based 20 miles north of us and whom my son's team always managed to come close to beating but never actually beat and whom they played against a *lot*. They lost 1-0. (Actually a bus was chartered and the parents who went had a blast.)
We were fortunate that the twinly mediocre municipalities of Dacron, Ohio were common venues and having close family in each we often got a family visit instead of more hotel stays.
*This was soccer, but I think there may be hockey rinks there so the teams in 21 might go there. Although I think Buffalo was a much more common destination for P'burgh hockey-industrial complex teams. (Back in the pre-ACA days some we knew's kid broke their arm playing in a tournament there and their insurance did not want to cover the local treatment because it was not for a "life-threatening" injury.