Swingers' party at hotel angers soccer parents

updated 1:13 p.m. ET Jan. 3, 2006

ORLANDO, Fla. - Some teenage soccer players and their parents saw more sights than they wanted when they stayed at a hotel where about 200 swingers were having a New Year’s party.

Paul Camporini brought his wife, seventh-grade daughter and eighth-grade son from Safety Harbor and said he had to “delicately explain to my Catholic school children that swingers change partners during the evening.”

“My biggest gripe is that the hotel had two distinctly different groups under the same roof,” said Camporini, 49. “A soccer team and middle-aged swingers should not have been booked together.”

The families said the sexually adventurous partygoers sometimes flashed breasts and bare buttocks in front of the children as they sashayed through the hotel atrium. The parents described the dress at the Crowne Plaza Hotel-Airport in Orlando as “raunchy, despicable and worse than prostitutes.”

“We thought we were coming to Orlando, not the Las Vegas Strip,” said Mark Gilbert, the father of a boy who plays on the Clearwater Chargers, a group of 13-and-under players from Florida.

No prior warning
The teams booked the $92-a-night rooms for Disney’s Soccer Showcase, and said hotel management did not tell them about the swingers’ party or try to keep the partygoers away from the children.

Hotel managers did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment Tuesday. All of the swingers had checked out of the hotel by late Sunday.

“We’re not prudes by any means,” said Rob Young of Greenville, S.C., who said his two daughters, Leah, 13 and Lauren, 11, asked questions he struggled to answer. “We would have liked to have been informed when we checked into the hotel so we could have made other arrangements.

“The kids could see through the glass atrium into the ballroom where naked people were dancing. There were exposed breasts, thongs and see-through dresses on women who were not wearing any underwear.”

Young said he complained to hotel management and to John Hollis, an off-duty Orlando police officer hired by the hotel for a New Year’s Eve security detail. He said neither did anything to help.

Lt. John Mina, a watch commander for the Orlando Police Department, said Hollis didn’t witness anything illegal.

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