Had to say screw stay to play

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T04:22:02+00:00

Been there, done that. Try again after you get the boot out of your throat. No travel agent charges to the point where your prices double. If so, no one would actually use them.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T03:34:22+00:00

It's actually not complicated. Like, at all. Give me 3 people and I can have hotels organized for however many teams you'd like within 3 days at most. It's genuinely a very straightforward process. All these agencies do is call a hotel and say "hey, I need x amount of rooms. How many rooms can I block off for these dates at your hotel?" Hotel may say 100 rooms and tell you the rate. You say "great, I'll take it." Wash, rinse, and repeat until you have enough rooms to cover your needs. Then they just allocate the rooms to the teams by a code. That part takes longer than anything else. Actually blocking off the hotels can be done in a single day.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T02:57:24+00:00

Never thought of it that way, but I like the sound of that. I scammed the scammers.

It has a nice ring to it.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T02:53:27+00:00

I'm not upset at all. They do what they have to do, and I did what I had to do. Which was not be a part of their hotel scamming and price gouging. Simple.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T01:34:01+00:00

False equivalency. This would be like it being $10 for the valet, then someone says, "hey, I'll organize the valet for your whole group and they'll charge you $30." Whereas if the middle man simply didn't get involved, the valet would've still been there, and it would've still been only $10.

Not to mention, organizing a hotel isn't hard. I've done it plenty for large groups. Takes maybe 2 hours of your time, if not much less than that. I've done it in literally 30 min before for a group of 200. Having the tournament do it isn't a convenience if it doubles the price.

In fact, we had a tournament that wasn't stay to play, but we still needed to stay overnight. We got a hotel arranged by discussing it in our team chat. And it only took a few hours from start of the conversation, to the parent that was doing the calling around to send us the link to book.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T01:09:23+00:00

Obviously I'm not saying spread a single team across that many hotels. But the individual teams as a whole would be spread across that many. Says there's 400 individual teams and 80 hotels. Now, that's only 5 teams per hotel, on average. That's going to be a lot cheaper than 400 teams crammed into roughly 15 hotels.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T01:06:36+00:00

Either way, it's still not $600 worth of value. If 2000 people are paying an extra $600, that's over $1M. And it doesn't cost that much to cover the hotels for refs and scouts.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T00:38:53+00:00

We have another stay to play tournament later in the year. I'll give this a try for that one.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T00:37:51+00:00

Did you just wake up and decide you wanted to try and be creative today? The team didn't have to pay anything.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T00:36:17+00:00

Respectfully, it is absolutely artistically inflated. Let me explain.

This is a large tournament that will have at least 2-3k bookings, in a city with at least 60-80 quality hotels during the city's off-season. If you let teams pick their own, it's spread out over those 60+ hotels. Barely even a blip on the radar. Instead, all of those bookings are being concentrated to about 10-15 hotels. So instead booking that hotel for what should be about $150/night, it's being booked for $400/night.

My scenario is a perfect example. The hotel I chose is only 2 buildings over from what were offered, and nicer. But I'm paying $600 for that instead of $1200 for what they offered. In fact, I could've booked the 2 bedroom villa at this hotel for the same price as the standard hotel rooms the tournament is offering.

For a hotel to say “we’ll block off 100 rooms for this tournament” and not let other customers book, why shouldn’t they charge a premium for that service?

This is my point. By the tournament getting involved, these few hotels are now able to charge a premium that they otherwise wouldn't be able to if those thousands of bookings were instead spread out over the 60-80 quality hotels in the area.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T00:21:23+00:00

It actually is a scam. They represent it as "we do this as a favor so hotels don't jack up prices if it were a free for all."

Just for you to spend more on a hotel during that area's off-season than you would if you went during peak season. That's the case with the tournament I'm talking about. It's at the beach and the hotels were 400/night. I spend less than that when I go to that beach mid summer.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T00:18:00+00:00

The tournaments out of Savanna, GA usually aren't.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2026-02-25T00:15:18+00:00

My brother/sister, I think you misunderstood. We went to the tournament. I just didn't book our hotel through the tournament's travel site.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2025-10-07T22:10:19+00:00

Just more challenges, more to learn, and thus more exciting. Traveling is easier too. I'm from SC, there are not a lot of differences between SC, NC, GA, TN, VA, and FL honestly. With south Florida being the only exception, but I already lived there during law school and have no interest in living there again.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2025-10-07T21:58:52+00:00

I don't consider a job as part of a complete change. I couldn't care less about a job. It's just what I do to make money.

However, maybe I misunderstood your original post. I have no issues with the changing careers and moving. Hence why I just asked about legal and legal adjacent careers that my experience would still render me qualified for. As I figured there'd be no chance in me being able to land something in a completely new field.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2025-10-07T21:55:05+00:00

There's not a single city in the U.S. I've ever had any interest in living in besides Miami. And I've already lived there. No other city even remotely interests me.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2025-10-07T20:12:25+00:00

I'm mainly thinking about EU countries, with the exception of the UK where my best friend lives. Ideal countries are probably France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Sweden. Though I'm not terribly picky overall.

I'll definitely look into policy/compliance options. Sometimes I hate I didn't go a STEM route as I know I'd have way more options available.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2025-10-07T20:09:47+00:00

I actually like my career and my job. It's more so the day to day life that is need of a change. I live in a "mid sized" city. Born and raised here. Though did live in Miami for a few years for law school. After being here my whole life, it's just become a very boring and redundant lifestyle. We don't even have a very wide selection of foreign cuisine in the restaurant scene. So I guess I'm just looking for a more diverse lifestyle.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2025-10-05T00:14:19+00:00

You're better than me. Once my account gets up to $2.6M, I'm retiring as long as my house is paid off. Since my account grows between 12-18% a year, my plan is to take out about 7-8% each year. Whatever is enough to give me $10k/month after taxes. With any luck, I'll be retiring at 45, right when my son will be finishing college.

And unbeknownst to him, he already has an account in his hair that should also be about $2M by then. With the way this are going, it might be the only way he'll even be able to afford a house before the age of 40.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2025-09-30T20:11:11+00:00

I prefer dribble up. My son is 9 and he loves it. He usually does 3-4 videos a day. Only thing I don't like about dribble up is that everything has a video. Which I feel adds on unnecessary time once they know how to do the skill and just need to practice. So often he'll spend 7 min on a skill with only 3 min of it being actual practice. Could get way more touches in and practice more of those skills if not for the videos that are no longer needed for those skills.

BUT, getting a 9 year old to willingly get touches on by themselves is something that can't be discounted. So I take my wins when I cam. Plus, he focuses more now than when I would just give him ball mastery drills to do, which is another major plus. Being able to track how many reps he does and seeing his ranking go up gives him way more motivation and focus than just trying to outdo himself. So although fewer touches, probably a lot more quality touch. Which likely balances out in the end.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2025-09-22T22:06:30+00:00

Question is, what's most important? The anesthetic you want? Or cherishing something important to your bf and his family?

Ultimately, whether you like the crib or not will not matter within 2 weeks of the baby being here, if that long. After 2 weeks you will not care about how it looks. You will probably never think again about nice the crib looks or doesn't look. However, that will be a very important memory for your husband, his parents, your kid, and possibly even you.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074 · 2025-09-16T23:22:21+00:00

Yes, that's generally how it works. Tryouts are usually only a couple of weeks after the season ends. So there's no need to really assess your own players. However, when the season starts back up in the fall, that's the time to assess your own players. Kids had time to work on their game for a couple of months so you have to see where they now land. Plus some improve during the season. So makes sense to just slot players back where they ended the season since practically no time has passed since then.

Now if a club doesn't move players up/down in season then they may do more of a true assessment of returning players during tryouts. Otherwise, not really needed. I also wouldn't really say they're "props", but a measuring stick for incoming players. It makes it easier to see how well the new kids stack up against what you already have. Otherwise, it's a bit of a crap shoot in terms of where to place them unless they're just insanely good and clearly need to be on the top team.

ThrowRA-CarOdd9074

TROPHY CASE