Stay-to-Play, and Why We Do Not Do It

November 10, 2026

A few seasons ago one of our teams was told, in writing, that it would be removed from a tournament unless the families booked their rooms through the event’s housing company. Not fined. Removed. The games were already paid for. We are not going to name the event, because the point of this piece is not one weekend in one city. The point is that nobody who heard about it was surprised.

That rule has a name. It is called stay-to-play, and if you have travelled with a youth team in the last ten years you have almost certainly paid for it without being told what you were paying for.

What Stay-to-Play Actually Is

A stay-to-play tournament requires travelling teams to book hotel rooms through an approved platform or from an approved list, usually with a minimum number of rooms and a minimum number of nights. Teams that book elsewhere face a buy-out fee, disqualification, or both. The requirement is typically triggered by distance, often anything beyond 50 or 75 miles.

It is not rare and it is not fringe. The Sports Events & Tourism Association found that close to 40% of tournament destinations required stay-to-play in 2023, which was itself down from about 60% in 2021. Families in that same year booked 73.5 million room nights for sports travel.

Where the Money Goes

This is the part that is rarely explained to the people paying it, so here is the mechanism in plain terms. A housing company contracts the room block with the hotel and takes a commission. It then rebates part of that commission back to the tournament operator, per room, per night. The family booking the room is the source of all of it.

Oklahoma Watch examined court records and contracts in a March 2025 investigation and put real numbers on it. One agreement paid the event operator $20 per room. Another gave the operator 30% of the booking agent’s commission plus a rebate. Court records in that reporting showed Varsity Brands collecting roughly $4 million a year from room rebates alone.

The scale of the intermediary business is public too. In court filings this year, the housing company Team Travel Source described booking 1.4 million hotel room nights annually and paying more than $17 million in rebates to operators in 2025.

What It Costs a Family

The surcharge shows up as a room rate that does not match the hotel’s own. In the same investigation, a January soccer tournament in the Kansas City area listed a Holiday Inn at $170 per night when that hotel’s published rate was $85 to $109. At a Tulsa hockey event, families were quoted $127 a night at a hotel charging $99, with $28 going to the booking agent as a non-refundable deposit.

Multiply that by a roster. Oklahoma Watch worked one example through: a 20-player team required to take three nights at $159 spends $9,540. The same families booking one night for themselves at $119 would spend $2,380. That is $358 per family, for a decision that has nothing to do with soccer.

Buy-outs exist, and they are priced to be unattractive. One softball national championship let teams opt out of its eight-room minimum for $2,400. One hockey event charged out-of-town teams a $500 stay-to-play fee for not booking through its system. Another family interviewed paid roughly $100 per player to be left alone.

The Threat Is Real, and It Is Written Down

It would be easier to dismiss all of this as posturing if the penalties were not published in the rules themselves. They are.

• Missouri Youth Soccer’s State Cup states that teams not using the tournament housing service may be disqualified from advancing in the National Championship Series, suspended from future state events, and fined $750.
• Bend FC’s Premier Cup requires teams travelling 75 miles or more to use a partner provider, and says violators are subject to disqualification without a refund of the entry fee.
• Oklahoma Watch documented an event where non-compliant players could be disqualified, the whole team removed, and a $2,000 registration fee forfeited.

One parent in that reporting summed up the position every travelling family is put in: “No one wants to be the parent that causes a team to get kicked out.” That is not a negotiation. It is leverage applied to a ten-year-old’s weekend.

It Is Now in Federal Court

In May 2026, parents of youth athletes filed a proposed nationwide class action against the housing company Team Travel Source. The case is Russell et al. v. The Complete Plan, Inc. d/b/a Team Travel Source, No. 3:26-cv-00360-CHB, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky.

The complaint alleges consumer fraud: that families were coerced into booking through the platform, that mandatory fees including a nightly “housing fee” were added and their nature obscured, that a lowest-rate guarantee was advertised and not honoured, and that parents were told their teams would be ineligible to compete unless they booked through the company.

Team Travel Source denies wrongdoing and moved to dismiss on July 8, 2026, arguing that it discloses its booking fees, that the complaint fails to state an actionable claim, and — notably — that stay-to-play policies are set by tournament operators, not by the housing company. As of this writing we have found no public ruling on that motion.

Whatever the court decides, that defence is worth sitting with, because it is almost certainly true. The housing company did not invent the rule. Someone running a tournament wrote it.

This Is the Pay-to-Play Problem Wearing a Different Hat

After the United States went out of the 2026 World Cup, the conversation about American player development landed, as it always does, on cost. The criticism is familiar and mostly fair: the pathway runs through clubs that charge, the charging filters the pool, and the pool is therefore smaller and narrower than a country of this size should produce. U.S. Soccer leadership spent the summer talking about fragmentation and about keeping talent identification local.

Stay-to-play is a small piece of that, but it is an unusually clear one, because the money does not go into coaching, fields, referees, or a scholarship fund. It goes into the operating budget of the organisation that required the booking, and it arrives as a markup on a hotel room that a family had to take to let their kid play three games.

We think the honest way to run an event is to state what it costs to enter, charge that, and stop. If a tournament cannot work on its entry fees, the answer is a different budget, not a surcharge laundered through a hotel block. Passing that cost on to families while telling them it is a logistics requirement is dirty, and it is unnecessary.

What We Do

Attacking Third is not a stay-to-play tournament and never has been. Teams book wherever they want: a block hotel, a hotel they already like, a rental, or family in town. There is no required booking platform, no buy-out fee for staying somewhere else, and no team will be penalized, fined, denied entry or removed over where it slept. Travel distance changes none of that.

We negotiate block rates with hotels near Alamo Sportplex and we will happily send you the list, because sometimes it is genuinely the cheapest option. Using it is optional. That is written into the published rulebook, not just onto a marketing page, so it is a rule we can be held to rather than a sentiment.

Five Questions Worth Asking Before You Enter Any Tournament

1. Is there a lodging requirement, and at what travel distance does it kick in?
2. If we book our own rooms, what happens? Get the answer in writing, and get the dollar amount of any buy-out.
3. Does the event or anyone connected to it receive a rebate or commission on rooms booked through its platform?
4. What is the hotel’s own published rate for those dates? Check it directly before you book anything.
5. What is the total cost per family for the weekend, not the entry fee? Entry is usually the smallest line.

Nobody owes you a polished answer to question three, but how an event reacts to being asked tells you most of what you need to know.

Related Reading

Our guide to San Antonio tournaments lists the weekends worth knowing about and the questions to ask about each, and the clubs landscape piece covers who actually plays here.

About Premier Futbol Academy

PFA is a nonprofit community soccer club on San Antonio’s northwest side, serving 600+ families across 50+ teams since 2017. We host the Attacking Third Tournament each November at Alamo Sportplex. Questions about the tournament: tournamentdirector@premierfasa.com.

Sources

Oklahoma Watch, “Forced Housing, Hidden Kickbacks: How Stay-to-Play Squeezes Sports Parents” (March 13, 2025); Sports Events & Tourism Association 2023 figures as reported in the same piece; Missouri Youth Soccer Association State Cup rules; Bend FC Premier Cup lodging policy; court filings in Russell et al. v. The Complete Plan, Inc. d/b/a Team Travel Source, No. 3:26-cv-00360-CHB (W.D. Ky.); post-World Cup youth development coverage in Front Office Sports and Forbes, summer 2026. Figures are as reported by those sources and were accurate when this was written.