Reading this: "Earlier this year, Pop Warner
announced a multi-year deal with Florida Citrus Sports (FCS) in which
Universal Orlando Resort became the host of the organization's historic championship week after 25 years at Walt Disney World. "
Either PW struck a deal with Universal, or FCS had the deal with US and PW's agreement w/ FCS required honoring FCS/US agreement. I'd imagine it's certainly cheaper to host the kids at US than Disney.
While our PW days are long behind us for our family, I will say hearing from those who are still actively involved in the organization, for a few years prior to Covid, things were really going downhill between PW and Disney. The organization of the event, lodging situations, transportation, etc was getting worse each year.
Hearing from a friend who was a manager at one of the resorts often frequented by the PW crowd, Disney was handing out compensation left and right to non-PW guests who we’re having their vacation drastically affected in a negative way by these crowds and resort behavior. These full price paying guests were going home with negative feelings about Disney, most likely telling their friends, etc. and it was kind of a giant negative snowball that just kept getting bigger and bigger. The effort was made to spread them out to more resorts to keep them from literally monopolizing an entire resort however, that just caused bad experiences at more resorts for the non-PW crowd. It literally made the situation worse.
I think Disney tried to push other options because the organization/group prices for the packages for this event definitely increased substantially in recent years. And it also seemed Disney became less and less accommodating to this event over the years. I don’t know, maybe they were trying to push them out without literally saying we don’t want you anymore.
Nonetheless, I’m sure Uni was happy to have them although it has required PW to make drastic modifications to their packages, schedules, and event locations. It’s definitely less expensive for PW, even with these modifications.
And in turn, Disney gets to fill its resorts with often, full price paying guests, who go home happy with their resort experience and intentions to return.
