Letters From The Editor:

Some of you may have read Friday’s Forum page piece by a Costa Mesa father concerned about a planned fee increase for the upcoming Pilot Cup (“Sounding Off: Soccer fee should apply to all equally”).

The per-player entry fee was to go from $5 to $10 for children enrolled in private schools. Public school students were to continue paying $5.

Cup organizers did not want to ask parents who send their children to Newport-Mesa schools, particularly those on the less-affluent Westside, to pay more in a sour economy. They also reasoned that the school district bore extra costs, because the games are played at Costa Mesa High School and the Farm Complex.

The logic was sound, the intentions good.

But a mistake was made.

Private school parents, not all of them wealthy, gave organizers a yellow card for charging inequitable fees. The parents said they scrape to afford tuition. And some of them live on the Westside.

So we’ve decided that everyone will pay the same fee to enter the popular youth soccer tournament organized by Kirk McIntosh, the Daily Pilot and the Los Angeles Times. That’s how it’s always been. That’s how it will be again this year.

Go to a public school? You’ll pay $5.

Go to a private school? You’ll pay $5, too.

Those fees apply before May 18. It will cost $7 to enter thereafter, no matter the school.

We should not have raised the fees to unequal levels. We messed with tradition. We messed up. We’re fixing it.

Now that doesn’t mean we will not revisit the fee schedule in 2011. This tournament is expensive to organize.

In the meantime, the focus of the Pilot Cup is fun and giving every kid in Newport Beach or Costa Mesa in third to sixth grades a chance to play soccer on behalf of their school. Let’s not forget that.

Last year, some 2,500 kids participated. They and their parents each paid the same price.

And they will do so again this year.

JOHN CANALIS is editorial director for the Daily Pilot, Laguna Beach Coastline Pilot and Huntington Beach Independent. He can be reached at (714) 966-4607 and [email protected]