Paper plate award horror

[Anonymous]

I always found these to be a complete waste of time. Just give out the major awards out and be done with it. Making sure everyone gets a paper plate to take home is ridiculous.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Did you have a good time at the end of season banquet? Maybe reflect on why your focused on team doing something different with the paper plates. No swim banquet should last more than 2-2.5 hours.

This lasted about 1.5 hours. There was plenty of time. For over 200 kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We just hang them for all to see and then kids collect them at the end of the night. Two hundred kids on the team it would be a nightmare if we talked about each one.

How many paper plate awards does your team too? Hanging them is a good idea if you give one to each kid. Our pool skipped the paper plate awards, and nobody was told or informed.

[Anonymous]

Bad for the environment. We glaze ceramic plates.

[Anonymous]

Our team did away with them a few years back. It is a tremendous amount of work for a group of underpaid coaches that are already working long hours in the hot sun. The week leading into Divisionals is intense and chaotic for them without making 200 personalized plates. If you want to continue the tradition, volunteer to make it happen next year. I don’t think you were entitled to advance notification of a change like this.
I agree that singling out a tiny group to still get them was misguided, especially if it was the “popular” or fast kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Bad for the environment. We glaze ceramic plates.

Instead of plates we build biodegradable bird seed wreaths and give them out to the elderly. Like this:

[Anonymous]

We had small group of swimmers made paper plate for coaches. It’s nice but while some got 10+ and others got much less or just 1-2, and wording like “ short” to describe coach’s height, it definitely hurt feelings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We just hang them for all to see and then kids collect them at the end of the night. Two hundred kids on the team it would be a nightmare if we talked about each one.

We have 200 kids and our banquet went from 6-8:30, even with 6+ seniors. Everyone got a plate. Kids who weren’t there got plates and if a sibling / cousin was there to accept it, they read it. It’s not a whole story. Just a quick sentence per kid. Some are obviously inside jokes and you can ask your kid to explain if you care .

[Anonymous]

We have different definitions of horror.

Since when do coaches do the paper plates anyway? When I was a kid the kids made them, that was the whole point. Why would adults make awards on a paper plate?

[Anonymous]

This story is bigger than the urban mom site. You should contact the press.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We just hang them for all to see and then kids collect them at the end of the night. Two hundred kids on the team it would be a nightmare if we talked about each one.

Our 200+ team does this too. I’m not sure why any of this is a big deal. They call each kid for their trophies/medals adding the paper plates would be a waste of time.

[Anonymous]

Is your kid upset?

From the original post, it sounds like you as the parent are upset and not the child. I'm wondering why this summer swim banquet means more to you than the swimmers.

I think you should take a moment to figure out why this is so important to you. Why is it so important to you that your child is publicly acknowledged?

[Anonymous]

I think they are stupid but younger kids like them. Even the HS swim team does them. Our summer team has the teen coaches do them, mostly during unpaid time, which is wrong.

[Anonymous]

My kid made four paper plate awards. It was fun and took about an hour.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think they are stupid but younger kids like them. Even the HS swim team does them. Our summer team has the teen coaches do them, mostly during unpaid time, which is wrong.

My daughter is a teen assistant coach and while she loves everything about summer swim, she and her fellow coaches spent hours and hours making paper plate awards for every kid on her team. A truly massive amount of work.