Tournament Bait & Switch

Upset yes but have to do research on Tournament and their history.

For example, in Texas there is a group called Brazos Valley Renegade that hosts tournament each year.  Games are played at Texas A&M and local high schools in the same town. No field took more than 15 minutes to get to. Local organization with local contacts.  

Friend's son play the next weekend in the same town but w/ different organization advertising it was at A&M.  No games played at their field and actually all the game were 30-45 miles away in different directions. Organization not from the area and had no contacts.

That is a tough and frustrating situation when you are not expecting it. Our experience in the Mid Atlantic is that tournaments that play in a small geographic area usually have several substandard venues where teams play pool or early rounds.  The better tournaments all involve driving to get to the top level fields  This past weekend we played in the U of M dynamic wood bat tournament and never saw the U of M field.  However 3 of the 4 locations we played were top notch turf facilities at a major college and a JUCO.  Maybe they have tremendous facilities in your area but for us to play on the best fields you have to drive a 45 minute to 1hr circle from the center which means the two furthest fields will be about an 1hr 30min apart. 

4 to 5 hours drive every day is enough to make someone upset...our total driving time from our home field to the 2 games last Friday and back was 4 hours (with no real traffic).  1hr 15 min to field one, 1hr 35 min to field two and 1 hour 10 min home.

For me, I will take the travel time over playing on a field where crazy bounces make a difference and outfielders are 6 feet lower than home plate where bad viewing from lawn chairs trying to see through chain link means you only see some of the game but that is probably not the norm for most people.  I was crazy to drive when I was 16 and I still love a good road trip...LOL.

IMO If they advertised that the teams would get games on the NU fields and the fields are not available then they should have provided the teams the option of dropping out of the tourney and getting a full refund.  This may have been something that was out of the tourney operators control but good customer service would dictate that you do what needs to be done to make things right.  

For some reason it seems to have become a little more "normal" at the HS age to have tourneys spread throughout Chicagoland.  Last year we played in one that was held in Elgin, Joliet and the South Suburbs.  Im guessing getting time on good full sized fields is at a premium this time of year.  In addition to travel ball you still have HS summer league going on.  

We have played at some of the fields they are using. I will say they did a decent job of finding decent fields to play this on. If I remember correctly ECC's field is pretty nice.  I know its not NU's but its a decent field.

I will say that if the primary reason for playing in this tourney is that you were hoping the NU coaches would catch some of the game, its a slim chance that was going to happen.  Whereas over at ECC there is a pretty good chance that a coach or someone from his organization will probably see the kids play.  We have found that at a lot of the smaller schools the folks taking care of the fields between games are coaches or players from that school.