In my understanding, there is only 1 soccer club in the Charleston area that currently "owns" their fields, JIYSC. The other clubs have arrangements of some form that provide them with a "home" set of fields. Others are in the process of building fields.
I'm not sure which league you are specifically talking about, but, for the leagues that I was affiliated with previously, each club that had teams registered to play in the league had to provide the use of a certain number of fields, based on the number of teams entered, for scheduling mathes. The actual scheduling of the fields was not at the discretion of the club.
Most often when this is brought up, it's from a point of competition between the clubs, external to the field of play. I know when I brought it up with the cups and games director a few years ago it was. I agree with Cainhoy's comments about it should be set up in advance, and whatever agreement is reached is between the clubs and not the league. But once the fields are offered up to the league, it's over, and the league really didn't have a mechanism to check. When I had that discussion it was relative to a particular club that had all of their home games scheduled at a different club, rather than their own fields. This was also when the cups and games director scheduled all the matches, not the club representatives.
I think the $50 per fee is what the state pays for the use of fields for state cup play. If it were applied club to club for use as you say above, it's really nothing more than a means to hinder or inhibit the use of the fields by the other club. If you think $50 would cover the cost of "maintenance" for the field to host that game, you need to dig deeper to understand the true costs field maintenance. The flip side of that, if you think that hosting a match somehow causes damage that is above the damage caused by practicing on the field during the week, you are also mistaken.
Given the clubs mentioned so prominently, MPSC and Cainhoy, and being skeptical, I think it's more about trying to stifle the perceived competition in the club market sector.
