Detroit (your e-mail)
Specifically, in response to the goalie stick strangeness at the hotel, I received this from a very nice fellow who wishes to remain anonymous:Back when I used to live in Wisconsin, I spent time as a clerk for a local Holiday Inn Express. We used to dread hockey season as those were some of our most stressful guests. I don’t know what a typical hockey weekend out for you is like, and truthfully, I can’t see you ever setting this example for Eli, but a typical hockey weekend for us looked like this. Enter the kids, usually loud and fairly unsupervised. Running, hollering, etc. Equipment didn’t need to be stored at the desk at the time, so that was usually carried up to the room to be played with later. The coaches and parents would stroll in after the kids, beer or drink usually in hand, a cooler on wheels following them. This procession would go on for the next half hour or so while everyone got their rooms squared away and then there would be hours of meet ups afterwards. These meet ups usually involved the hockey players going from floor to floor to talk, racing up and down the stairs, down the halls and ending up in the snack area or pool room. Adults would convene down in the common area and drink, usually. Things would taper off around midnight, one o’clock, for the most part. Guest complaints were many, supervision was minimal, and the one or two staff on duty at night were usually constantly addressing the fallout. From a hotel perspective, almost not worth it. One year we didn’t take hockey teams.
I don’t know how much of my experience mirrors other hotels in the region, or across hockey in general, but out of all the travelling sports teams, hockey was easily the worst.
He also followed up with this:
The hotel always expects a certain amount of noise from groups of kids, it’s only natural. What surprised me was how normal the coaches and parents treated the combination of lack of supervision of the children combined with their own partying. At first I thought that was a fluke, but it didn’t take me long to learn differently.
If that's the kind of behavior they were seeing at our hotel in Michigan, I can much better understand that "no sticks in rooms" policy.
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