I think your 90% claim may be too high.
Of all the shoe choices, Converse are such a pain to pit on and take off!
Our gym absolutely makes a profit on all required uniform items. A required team tshirt and State team tshirt at $30 apiece at over 100 kids is just the tip of the iceberg. Buy it for 10 sell it for $30, $20 profit for tshirt. Presto, $4000 profit for gym on two tshirt orders. The kids wear the state shirt the day of the State meet (making the warmups they never wear to warm up or the podium unnecessary). The other tshirt is just another tshirt.
That is what I love about our YMCA district ... Regular meets have no SWAG and they get ribbons instead of medals / trophies ... $15 per meet. Championships, they get medals and a participation trophy ... $35.
There are so many factors that weigh into the equation. We try to keep our meet fees lower than those that we know offer a leotard. But, the leotards price to the hosting gym is based on how many are purchased. A huge meet gets a HUGE discount vs the few hundred gymnasts at a meet - like almost half the price (we've looked into it). Other factors are the facility and equipment rentals. One set up of equipment, rented for a 2 day meet this year is $7000. The price is insane. So, these smaller meets (300-600 range) might not be significantly cheaper but the flip side is, if all of the smaller meets disappear, the travel time/expense would go up because there would be less meets in an area. I would love to do away with the gymnast gift BUT it's like keeping up with the Jones' and trying to put on a nice meet that people will want to come back to! We typically try to keep meet gifts less than $10. Sometimes we can find something awesome for less and other times we spend up to the $10...ya just never know what you can find each year that is unique, the girls will like and appeal to the 5 year old and the teenager.
The keeping up with the jones is the whole problem, I think. For a small meet, why rent equipment? Just host it in the gym- that’s where all the small meets we’ve attended have been. No equipment or facilities rentals required- still doesn’t lower the costs in our experience.
In our area, only the really really small meets are hosted in a gym. The biggest issue is seating/viewing, parking and bathrooms. We did it once. The sessions were so small and the number of kids we could host wasn’t worth the profit made for a weekend of parents’ time. We did have one larger meet we attended each year as low level compulsory,hosted at a gym. It was a decent sized gym but the viewing was awful, the parking had us walking from a near by strip mall and the gymnast entry fee was similar to those that rent out facilities and equipment. By the time I started helping plan our gym’s meet, I was livid at how much they were making off of us - especially since going to it was a painful and long, packed like sardines 4 hour experience.
We’ve been to a single meet (last year) that didn’t charge spectator fees, and it was a very welcome change! It’s so rare though, at least for us.
You have to rent the scoring equipment and sometimes the PA system. Something to play the music on and someone to play it, and someone to run the meet (meet director). It all adds up. Meets are the biggest fundraiser of the year for the hosting gym.
usually in-gym meets have a much lower entry fee, like $7 - $10.
Our parent organization (all volunteer) runs all the meets hosted by our gym with the exception of Judges Cup. That's generally 4 meets a year on average. Even the meets held in our own gym, where we can run two flights at the same time, still have a significant overhead, including paying judges, hospitality for the judges and coaches, medals/ribbons for the athletes, fronting all of the snack bar costs (try having a meet where there's no food - even a small one). Our meets are our biggest fundraisers, and our organization's fundraisers ensure that more kids can participate because the bulk of our money goes to subsidizing athlete assessments and costs. I pay half of what I've paid at other gyms for my daughter's assessments, as a direct result of these meets, among the other fundraising we do all year long.
