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29

Jul, 2024

Understanding Our National Championship Model

For more than 60 years Pop Warner has hosted a year-end national championship celebration unlike any in youth sports. As we planned for this year’s Pop Warner Super Bowl and Cheer & Dance Nationals, we thought it was important to share some revisions to the event honed by your input and recommendations.

While not every recommendation is feasible, many are. That’s why listening to input from a variety of stakeholders is crucial to build out a single event model. We believe this year’s event strikes a good balance.

But before we share the updates to the program, I think it’s important to address some of the big picture questions around our national championship event. While attending each of our eight regional meetings earlier this year, many of the questions hit a variation of the same points: 

1) Why is the event not at Disney anymore?
2) Does the event have to stay in Orlando?
3) Is stay-to-play here for good?; and 
4) Can you make the event more affordable?

To understand our national championship event economic model we have to first look at the national championship format.

True National Championship
The biggest thing that separates Pop Warner from other youth sports organizations is we aspire to a true national championship. Several other organizations have fantastic national events, but their planning, qualification and registration windows are much longer. 

With Pop Warner’s true national championship format, teams are qualifying a month before the event starts. This causes a flurry of travel planning, fundraising and registration and booking in what feels like the 11th hour. Yet, according to the 2022 Presidents Survey, in which we polled a cross-section of league and association presidents, 73% of respondents rated the true national championship format as important or very important.

We understand why a true national championship is important. The scope and scale of the Pop Warner Super Bowl and Cheer & Dance Nationals make our championships a premier event in all of youth sports. However, the format presents a key challenge: ample lodging for all the players, coaches, family members, administrators, volunteers and other spectators that participate in the event. In all, we host upwards of 30,000 individuals each year, with most expressing an interest to stay as part of their respective team or organization.

This presents a challenge: securing ample lodging at affordable prices for all of the teams that are participating. This is secured months in advance, before any team has qualified for the Pop Warner Super Bowl or Cheer & Dance Nationals. The format carries risk for Pop Warner to hold the rooms, and an equal amount of risk for the hotel operators as they trust the entire room block is eventually booked. Consider this from the perspective of a hotel operator: wouldn’t they rather book those rooms the first chance they could and secure the reservation? Therein lies the issue with our former partner, Disney Sports.

So Why Not Disney?
When Pop Warner returned to the Orlando area in 1995, the national championships were held in partnership with Disney but the venue was in Lake Buena Vista. In 1997, the Pop Warner Super Bowl and Cheer & Dance Nationals were the first outside organization to christen Disney’s brand new Wide World of Sports Complex. The all-encompassing resort, its theme parks, the accessible transportation throughout, and close proximity of the sport venues left all of us with fond memories.

Our event was one of Disney’s largest outside event for years, as Walt Disney World in general saw unprecedented growth. Many of us have witnessed firsthand the explosive growth of Disney and the increase in visitors since the 1990s. However, that growth came with a cost.

Early on in our partnership with Disney, we provided a lot of room nights and theme park attendance during a time of year – between Thanksgiving and Christmas – that was said to be the slowest stretch for the resort. In 2019, the final year of our most recent agreement, Disney was reportedly at 97% capacity on a regular basis during that time period, with the capability to book and secure reservations well in advance. Unfortunately, Pop Warner was no longer the magic wand it was decades prior.

A New Era

Once we understood that we would need to find a new home for our national championship event, we sent requests for proposals to several entities across the United States. These included event management firms, travel and tourism bureaus, and sports venues, in a variety of states including California and Texas. We sought four basic criteria: 

1) Climate appropriate for outdoor activity,
2) Football and cheer & dance venues in close proximity,
3) A sufficient amount of lodging and hotel rooms in the region, and 
4) A preference for an area that already had Pop Warner leagues and associations.

The biggest challenge of those four was lodging and hotel rooms. In the few instances where there was a sufficient number of total hotel rooms, the hurdle was getting these hotel operators to buy into the pacing of our true national championship event format. As stated above, this means taking on the risk of providing large room blocks and then trusting rooms are booked just weeks before the event. Our best proof of concept was and still is in the Orlando market, which boasts the second most hotel rooms (130,000-plus) of any metro area in the country.

This gave us an opportunity to partner with Florida Citrus Sports on our national championship. With Florida Citrus Sports, we’re able to gain event management expertise and operational capacity to make our national event a great one. This partnership is also a great fit on many levels, as Pop Warner and Florida Citrus Sports are aligned on values-driven, cause-based, non-profit objectives.

Hotel Integration is Still Key
Our hotel partners will remain a key component of the event model. Events in which a participant is required to stay in a partner hotel, often referred to as “stay-to-play” events, are increasingly common in youth sports and may be deemed the industry standard. 

The biggest benefit of this event is that it stretches each dollar further. With so many people attending, we can negotiate good prices on rooms and bring some of that spending back into the event budget. This helps reduce your overall costs by leveraging the need for lodging.

For last year’s event, Pop Warner and our partner, Florida Citrus Sports, had to secure total room blocks in the Orlando area as early as April for the December event in which participants would not start booking rooms until at most one month prior to arrival. By securing these rooms early we’re locking in substantial savings on each room. For example, last year’s participants saved an average of $80 per room per night compared to the regular room rate during the week of our event.

An alternative, in which participating teams can book on their own, will result in increased event-related fees, such as registration and tickets, to meet the event operations budget. As a result, it is reasonable to predict that the average overall total cost of event participation per team will increase. Also, regional travel & tourism groups like Visit Orlando suggested there would not be enough rooms available at individual hotels at that late date to allow each of our teams to stay together. This will also inhibit us from providing bus transportation. In the 2023 post-event survey, 76% of guests stated they used bus transportation.

Another consideration is working with the city of Orlando, or any host city, and surrounding municipalities, to ensure proper coverage of the event. Orlando, for example, considers events such as Pop Warner’s to be a “City-Wide Event.” Advanced planning allows these local governments to appropriately allocate resources and personnel for things like police protection, law enforcement, and traffic control. 

Trimming Costs
As mentioned above, the “stay-to-play” concept is a method of minimizing costs. For the 2024 event this December, we’ve taken steps to trim costs even further. Without a single, large-scale theme park resort hotel partner like we had in the past, we have removed the requirement of purchasing theme park tickets.

We know there’s value in these theme park experiences; in recent years our partners have reported high utilization of tickets, plus a high number of multiple visits per person to the parks. Therefore, you’ll now be able to choose to purchase these tickets, at a special Pop Warner discount, as an add-on to your event package. Please keep in mind that purchasing these tickets through Pop Warner not only gets you a discount, but helps recycle some of the money back into the event.

The Pop Warner Party has always provided peak moments for many of our participants. In the 2023 post-event survey, 62% valued the party experience. However, to help lower costs, which is a higher priority for our members, we worked with SeaWorld to restructure the Pop Warner Party. For this year's event we're offering the Party as an optional add-on experience; the more buy-in we get the bigger the party becomes.

We’ll Keep Listening
We’re excited about the 2024 season, and are grateful for your feedback and partnership. We hope this provides insight into some of the planning and operations decisions. As we’ve done the past few years, we will issue a post-event survey to key stakeholders to help us further refine this exciting championship event.

Best of luck to all teams chasing those national championship dreams. We hope to see you in Orlando this December.







Tim Glase
Chief Operating Officer

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