I’m familiar with a convention that has been ongoing for a long time. It has been running for about 30 years, and they had their leadership and management down pat. They even had developed their own CRM software to run the operations of the convention. They ran a pretty tight ship, and have an actual board, with a coterie of dedicated volunteers.

COVID messed things up for them. They had to cancel a few years, but last year they returned to the hotel they’d used for a number of years (pre-COVID) that they regularly sold out. They had been debating moving the convention to a different city to gain access to even larger hotels. Last year was sort of a bust. They barely met their reserve with the hotel. The magic had sort of dropped out of the event. This year they did move to a city about 45 minutes from the original one, to a smaller hotel - hoping to save on costs as they rebuilt their fan base.
Unfortunately, the city they picked was where a preponderance of their dedicated attendees live. Their attendance did grow, but they failed to meet their hotel reservation reserve by a lot, because many attendees drove in, or crashed with local friends. After penalties were paid out, they had to tap into ticket sales (which fund the incidentals and the next year’s convention), and then into the scant reserves of the convention. Now, it may not be possible for them to ever field another convention again.

Which is all to say - Conventions are hard. And even committees with decades of experience can mess things up so dramatically that they just ruin the entire lineage.
A teenager? Even a smart one - I’m surprised they even got a venue.