SoCal Cup, and stay-and-play in general

There's no way that SoCal cup is happening, yeah? Registration deadline of July 6 for playing dates of August 7-9? It's a beautiful complex-- maybe a little dusty in the parking lot-- but there's no way they could enforce social distancing there. Also why tack on the extra risk of a stay and play requirement? Jam some local hotels in Oceanside and Carlsbad to spread the rona around in the lobby? What's the point of getting a bunch of kids who haven't been training for months to jump into it this early? Not for that luggage tag, right?
 
To SoCal Cup Players/Parents & Coaches,

After careful thought and consideration, Oceanside Breakers have decided to postpone SoCal Cup 2020.

The recent announcement regarding the start of club soccer league play in Southern California being pushed back into October, has allowed us to postpone our tournament rather than canceling it. We have spoken to SoCal Sports Complex and have secured a date of September 19 & 20 to operate our event.
 
Stay and play is a topic that has been worked to death on this forum. Your local club's tournament might eventually get popular enough so that a local hotel will offer a discount to teams that register through the tournament website, or some other amenity like a free conference room for registration night. The next step up is hotel or hotels paying your little local club a part of the income they receive from room reservations if you institute a "pay-to-play" feature - the club makes a little money and the hotel passes it on to the teams. I always enjoyed playing in local pay-to-play tournaments like S___ __p where we could get an exemption because we were locals.

The worst example of this that I interacted with was the USYSA Western Regional Tournament in Albuquerque a few years back (2008 or so?). The local organizing committee website required all teams to reserve hotel rooms through them, and since it is only offered to teams who qualified through National Cup or Western Regional League, there was a strong incentive and expectation to go. We had a pretty good boys team and we thought there was a chance to make it there, so I did some checking on hotel costs to help out the team manager (we ended up losing in the semifinals of National Cup to the eventual champion). A quick comparison through internet travel websites showed that similar rooms in the same hotels could be obtained for about 20% less than the committee was offering. I brought this up at a Presidio League meeting where one of the candidates for Cal South President that year gave a presentation and answered questions from the audience. He said that Cal South had expressed disapproval, but that they were outvoted.

And it doesn't have to be that way. In 2009 our USL Super-20 summer-league team that had a lot of the same players on it earned an invitation to the North American Finals in Rockford, Illinois. That organization had a headquarters hotel that offered genuine discounts to families that registered there, as did about half our team (the rest stayed with a player's uncle who lived just over the border in Wisconsin).
 
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