I know I should probably just let this thing play out but I know most of you guys and have no problem sharing with you what I know through our tournaments and how we do things...
1) The first email of the year that we send out, every year, comes out in October/November for the following Summer regarding our entry fees, venues and the fact that we DO get a kick back from the hotels and we "require" teams to stay at our hotels. We don't tell you which hotel you must stay at, we book 6-12 different venues from $79-169 in some areas to give everyone the opportunity to choose where they want to stay, and if you still can't find one that is suitable let us know where you want to stay and we will find the property that fits your budget and needs. 99.9% of the time we can get lower rates than the parents can because of the quantity of rooms we book across the country, we work with the national heads of these hotels so they make sure of it. Hotels that offer you a lower rate are doing so against their contract with us and are essentially putting themselves at risk and violating the terms of our contracts because we mandate that our teams get the lowest rates available (with the exception of military personnel). We don't mandate what the rate is going to be, we fight for it to be less than what they initially offer, but we do mandate that nobody gets a lower rate...that's the point of us making them our host hotel in the first place. So our first email of the year confirms your suspicions on host hotels, though we do not hide it from anyone and in fact have had it posted on the front page of our website on numerous occasions. Nearly 100% of the actual tournament hosts, not just someone throwing an event together, require teams to stay in a host hotel.
2) Why do WE require the stay to play policy? We do so because our entry fees went up for the first time, by $25 per team, since 2007. Every year the facility fees go up, insurance goes up, baseball costs go up, travel goes up, etc...everything has increased every year and the way we combated those increases was by trying to do things the right way at our events so more teams would attend. When we started hosting in Stillwater in 2006 our feature facility cost us $3500 for 20 total games...that was $8000 in 2011. We are different than most hosts as we try to utilize as many college venues as possible...none coming at anything less than $125-150 per game to utilize and we use several across the country that are $500 a game take it or leave it...throw in umpires and insurance and 1/2 of your entry fee in to that event is gone on that single game. So back to the question...why...we wouldn't be here if we didn't. We provide baseballs at our events ($100,000+ per year), we pay for a site director at every site (another $25-50 a game), we don't collect gate fees, we don't keep a penny from concessions and we don't make much on tshirts and apparel (our hats cost $11 and some change and we sell them for $10 each, tshirts run close to $6 each at times and we sell them for $10...to be perfectly honest I still think it's cool that the kids and parents like to wear our apparel in the first place so I'm not trying to make a quick buck off of it).
3) So I'm sure I'm going to get an email from some other hosts ripping me for doing so but here is a real run down of what actual tournament numbers look like and where the money comes and goes for us in particular and since we are talking about the SW region here lets run with OK State and the costs associated:
-30 teams at $875 = $26,250
-OK State = $8000
-74 games @ $110 for umpires = $8140
-74 games @ an avg of 5.25 balls per game is about 32 dozen balls @ $35/dozen = $1120
-30 teams at $7 for insurance = $210
-Other HS facilities carry 40 of the 60 pool play games at $75/game (nobody is $50 anymore) = $3000
-Site directors at each of the other facilities @ an average of $100/day = $1200 (includes Sunday)
-Lead director (flight+rental car) = $500 minimum
Total Income = $26,250
Total Expenses = $22,170
Obviously this doesn't include any gas, food, trophies, but you get the point of where the big expenses come from.
Hopefully there is no rain because we cover the costs associated with the use of turface, etc. I guess the point of this little rant is to clarify where money is coming and going and how it is worked. Hotels do not account for much of this as the vast majority of the time teams are not staying 4 nights...they are now traveling in on Thursday's and leaving on Saturday's so there is only 2 nights worth of stays for roughly $250-300 total room nights for the weekend. The numbers in one of the previous posts are grossly over estimated in that sense. The issue with the numbers I have given above is this...if there aren't 30 teams the costs above stay relatively similar while the total income drops dramatically.
When it is all said and done this is an absolute full time job that 4 of us in our offices spend 350+ days a year working on. We don't get days off from May to August and more times than not 40 hours a week doesn't quite cut it and that isn't enough time to get everything done (June and July are probably closer to 105 hours a week). I guess from our view we have every right to push teams to specific hotels because when we don't we don't make it and these events wouldn't be worth it when considering the amount of time it takes to set everything up. It's not as easy as one may think (I used over 10,000 minutes on my cell phone in June...and it's not over yet, I get a minimum of 3 calls a night between the hours of 12AM and 2AM AND I answer them, and we have to deal with the teams that pull out at the last minute which makes us have to rework schedules which in return makes the remaining teams tell us we stink and we don't know what we are doing...there is no amount of money that is worth wearing those conversations week after week because of what one of the teams did to us at the last minute I can assure you that).
So...do I think there is a need for a reform...NO...should 18's travel all over the country to events looking for college coaches to recruit them...probably not unless you have some true kids that are D1 caliber talent...would it be cool for them to get one last chance to play on a top D1 facility before going to a smaller school/JC/etc or finishing their baseball careers altogether...YES. From my point of view a reform is a bit drastic and likely completely overkill as once you guys get in to running events and doing the inter workings of messing with all of this you will quickly realize that there is nothing fun about organizing these events BUT I do think a reform on expectations on what your personal goals from an event should be would be a good idea. We have scouts at our events but we can't tell them who to see or what fields to go to...work for your players a little bit and do your own recruiting...college coaches LOVE these tournaments and no it doesn't take away from what they make as many of them get the opportunity to recruit from home and the programs make money from the events and facility rentals on occasion. We could easily have 60 schools at a tournament with 50 teams in attendance and 25 of the teams could leave and say "we didn't see one scout at that event." Why does that happen? The coaches aren't doing the work behind the scenes to get the honest word out about their players and who should be interested in them (if you tell a coach you have a kid that is 86-88 on the mound and he is really 81-82 the rest of the kids on your team are going to suffer because the scouts and coaches WILL talk and tell each other that that coach over exaggerates the talent he has...you may have taken that kid from a real D2 prospect to a D3 or JC kid because of that). I would love to do the work for you guys to further promote the talent that comes to our events but there isn't enough time in the day and we, quite frankly, don't know what kind of talent you are going to have on your team from year to year. So instead of reforming the tournaments themselves simply reform the approach you are taking...some events are going to get your kids the games they need to stay in shape and where they should be, some events are well scouted events, and some events are too expensive and too far or in a region that your kids aren't going to get recruited at anyway unless you have someone that is 92-94 on the mound from the left side.
This is far too much time for me to put in to this but in closing we want to run good quality events because teams pay us hard earned money to do so...some of that money comes from the hotels so we don't have to raise our entry fees to $1000-1100 a pop...do we make money off of our events...absolutely, if we didn't we wouldn't be doing this. This IS in fact a business that was created to provide a benefit to the teams and put food on the table for about 30 staff members that work for us and close to 1000 other people that are affected by our events...in essence this is a much larger than just the tournament host we are talking about. All of this really comes down to someone's dissatisfaction on whether or not it is right to have a stay to play policy with regards to hotels...if you are going to stay in a hotel in the first place find one that you are okay with and use it, if you don't find one you like tell the tournament director what you want and your requirements and I bet they will do the work for you to get you exactly what you want, if you find a host hotel that is giving you a cheaper rate than what the tournament host lists the hotel is doing so illegally and can get in some serious trouble for doing so but don't blame that on the tournament host as most of us have the documentation in place that guarantees our people the lowest rates.
I know I've wrapped this up twice but before you guys jump on this band wagon...don't throw all event hosts in a pile and yell for reform. I know it seems like a very easy concept and a painless thing to do but it's not. Again, I'm sure this is going to get some phone calls my way from some directors but when it is all said and done you guys pay me to do what we do, likely to do what you guys would never want to do, and I love it about 99% of the time but I figured there is some knowledgable information above for everyone to chew on a bit.
