The title of this thread is misleading. I thought it was about bubble screens.
The title of this thread is misleading. I thought it was about bubble screens.
About 15 years ago I was in charge of scheduling gym time for practices and games for a youth basketball league which had about 60 teams of ten kids each.
They ranged from travel level teams down to ones where we couldn't find a parent on the team willing to coach. In addition to coaching my son's team, I coached another team of almost beginner kids.
We had to cobble together gym time from various local schools, churches, and community colleges. The league season overlapped all sorts of different events and schedules of each of these facilities so that the times and locations available each week were highly variable. I would spend hours each week trying to come up with a spreadsheet of teams slotted into each facility. We would take into consideration age groups and experience level in choosing different gyms as best we could, but some weeks it was not pretty and some weeks we would not have enough slots to cover all teams. I remember one choice email I got from one of the 600 parents that wanted to know why I had not consulted with all of the parents before choosing the practice times.
I can pretty much guarantee that any one of these teams would have been extremely happy to have a practice time before 9PM scheduled to be at the same time and location each week.
Same. In the olden times I coached a Durham United youth select soccer team, which later became the Durham-CH select team. During soccer season I enjoyed the roughly biweekly road trips with my wife, my son and his teammates/friends. I also enjoyed hanging out with and building friendships with some of the parents. But we were lucky - we had a great group of parents. That’s not to be taken for granted - it certainly was not always true on my sons’ other sports teams.
After a few years we ended up playing in the U-19 Final Four in Washington, DC. (I’m pretty sure we were the first NC soccer team to do so!) Anyway, on this trip one of my forwards - on a dare from my goalkeeper - lit a match under a smoke detector in our hotel, setting off the sprinkler system for the entire floor and causing 10’s of thousands of dollars of water damage. The gk’s father — the owner of Durham’s White Star Laundry ‘chain’ — was personally on the hook for the $$ because his liability insurance didn’t cover damages resulting from deliberate acts.
So like I said - fun times! Wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Note: I have to say that, in my experience, coaching a select team was more fun than coaching rec teams. The rec teams of course had many wonderful kids & parents that were great to work with. But I inevitably found some of the rec team kids didn’t really want to be there. And some (often non-overlapping) parents seemed equally uninterested in the whole sporting experience. Getting the attention and cooperation of all these kids and parents was often akin to herding cats. But (in my experience, ymmv) select team kids and parents were more motivated and showed up on time and were ready to work/play because they loved the game and wanted to be the best they could be. That shared passion between coach, kids & their parents lead to a more fulfilling experience for us all.
But again, I was lucky. We didn’t have any of the a-hole over-competitive parents, the kind I saw in my one season of coaching Little League. Ugggh.. a couple of those parents still give me PTSD. <shudder>