Nothing like paying the equivalent nightly fee to a stay at the Marriott for a college dorm room.
Some cities just don’t the infrastructure to handle multiple events at once, and that exact thing is playing out in Lexington, Kentucky this weekend. The results and stories of the town’s overbooking have been pretty entertaining.
College baseball has entered into the postseason, and the NCAA tournament decided to grant the University of Kentucky with the honors of hosting part of the playoffs as a 2023 Lexington Regional site. The University of Kentucky is among the four teams playing at the regional site, with West Virginia, Ball State, and Indiana making up the other three teams.
Bringing other colleges into town to play meaningful postseason games at your stadium can be a very rewarding experience, but you usually want to make sure that those other teams have a place to stay for the 3 day (possibly 4) regional tournament.
Lexington’s Railbird Festival happens to take place the same weekend of the the college baseball regional tournament, and the impressive lineup apparently drew in a rather large crowd and filled the surrounding hotels.
The heavy hitting headliners for the two day festival are country music stars Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers. The rest of the lineup is filled by other great artists including Whiskey Myers, Morgan Wade, Charley Crockett, Charles Wesley Godwin, and Sierra Ferrell among others.
And if you happen to be a country music fan but still dabble a little in the classic stylings of Weezer or Mumford and Sons, this lineup may speaking directly to you.
The tweet is captioned:
“Your RailbirdFest 2023 Lineup has arrived! We can’t wait to bring the Kentucky spirit to The Infield at Red Mile with Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers, Weezer, and more.”
That great lineup turns out to be a little bit of a problem when it comes to the availability of lodging. With all of the city’s hotels booked up, the University of Kentucky brainstormed a bit and came up with an idea to host the other three visiting teams.
I’d imagine someone in charge said something like this:
“Hey, there aren’t any hotels available, even though we were supposed to make sure there would be since we are a host site. So, let’s make even more money and charge $185 dollars a night for visiting teams to use our vacant dorm rooms.”
And that’s exactly what they did.
One hundred and eighty five dollars (I spelled that out for dramatic effect) a night for a dorm room. I’ll concede that UK does have some nice, recently updated dorms, but that price point does seem a little bit like they are trying to stuff their pockets.
Ben Upton, a prominent voice in college baseball, took to Twitter to voice more about the situation, saying:
“BREAKING: Lexington, Kentucky Regional.
No hotels within an hour of Lexington because of a country music festival. West Virginia, Indiana, and Ball State players and coaches are staying in UK dorm rooms…
Read what was sent out to teams.”
Wow, what an honor for West Virginia, Indiana, and Ball State. After having remarkable seasons and making it to the NCAA tournament, they get to stay in dorm rooms for around a week.
Also kind of seems like the housing situation gives the Kentucky Wildcats a bit of an advantage, does it not? Other teams will be cramming four to a room on-campus while the Kentucky players probably have great, comfortable set ups off campus.
This might warrant a future NCAA investigation, especially if the Wildcats come out of the regional site…
