The Colorado Crossroads volleyball tournament dropped the ball last year when breastfeeding coaches rebelled against COVID rules...now it's trying to rebound.
In the past, Conway charged restaurants a $500 trade fee. This year, she’s charging $250. She's reduced booth fees, too, from $2,000 to $200. She says she lowered the rates partially because she can’t guarantee as much business for partners, but also because she wants to help them rebound from the pandemic.
The club could have sent its regional teams to Colorado Crossroads and its national teams to Salt Lake City, which took Colorado Crossroads' place as a regional qualifier with the USAV nationals, but it was important to the club to have everyone together at least once a year, she says. “Just having talked to some of the local shops…they always mention they can always tell when Crossroads is here because these tall girls start walking all around the place,” Miret says. And after the lack of conventions over the past two years, he thinks that
Carollo is hoping that the tournament has kicked off a return to some normalcy at the Colorado Convention Center. The facility laid off almost all of its staff after it became clear that the pandemic wouldn’t pass quickly, and had just started hiring people back when the Omicron variant emerged. But Carollo says this year looks much less uncertain than the last two already, with events on the calendar in most months. And July, September and October of 2021 were solid, he says. Still, the number of conventions and other gatherings aren't back to pre-pandemic levels, and some aren't seeing the number of attendees they did before. That hasn't been the case for live performances, especially concerts; most of those have sold out, he notes.