Families that never volunteer - swim team

[Anonymous]

At our pool the number of jobs a parent is asked to volunteer for is based on the number of kids you have on the team. For one kid, 3 jobs, which seems fair to me. The "consequence" of not completing the volunteer hours is not being able to attend the end-of-season banquet. Of course then I was paranoid over missing the banquet for other reasons, lest people think it's because we didn't volunteer! lol.

I'm sure there are some slacker parents at our pool, but I only know of one personally who just doesn't bother volunteering. I think sometimes they struggle getting people to sign up for particular jobs that require more responsibility or jobs that are deemed "easy" but don't count as a full job on their own.

[Anonymous]

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[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Why don’t you not let the delinquent families not swim? I know it totally sucks to punish a kid for their parents’ faults but maybe you need to actually enforce things? Don’t ban them for next season- make it the next meet.

+1, that seems like a great solutions, but the people on this board would rather complain anonymously instead of doing anything to change the status quo.

This idea is floated every year and is always a source of early July musings at our pool. The reality is that the way many teams are run, there isn’t anyone with actual authority to block participation. It would take a board vote to amend the bylaws and I don’t see many boards that would be willing to bother with this. Even if they did, enforcement would be tough- you’d have to have a club manager or board member intercept and refund registration at the beginning of the year, and have high school and college aged coaches with the confidence and authority to tell a kid to get out of a lane when they show up to practice. And then on the back end, there could be repercussions in terms of the original member agreement a club member signed vs. the benefits of membership they have access to. We even worked in the off-season to see if we could institute a no-volunteer fee to be levied at the end of the season but gave up because of the complications.

Anyway, by late July, as a parent rep I mostly forget the annoyances of volunteer recruiting and just feel the happy glow of a fun season. It always works out.

Interesting. Luckily at our pool, there are fmvery few families with swimmers who swim at A meets who fail to volunteer regularly. The B meets are a different beast and arguably so much more work. Very frustrating to see hundreds of kids swim and the same bedraggled volunteers running the show. I’ve started to sit a few B meets out to put pressure on those parents. I think maybe giving the families that DO volunteer some kind of extra credit could be a work around vis a vis the rules though. There are also ways to track and incentivize volunteer hours—a little fun competition? Winner gets a zero gravity lounger for the next season? Who knows. But some teams obviously need to make volunteering more fun.

The families who complete their volunteer hours at our pool get an early team registration link (our management board is always threatening to cap our team size). Since the threat hasn’t been fulfilled yet, it’s not a huge prize but it’s something.

Volunteering at B meets is a lot more work than volunteering at A meets. Many of our B meet only swim parents who are in the know sign up to volunteer only at A meets.

It does make you summer swim savvy but I also find that it makes you a little bit of an a-hole to purposely volunteer at the meets your kid isn’t fast enough to make because volunteering at those meets is easier than volunteering at the meets your kid is swimming in. I totally get the people that do it because they are wrangling little ones at the B meets, but otherwise those people are also part of the problem because they are snagging volunteer slots from people who are actually at that meet.

Nonsense. Our team requires you work at 5 meets. If my kid only swims in two B meets all season, I still have to work at extra meets to hit 5. I don't need to wrangle kids, so I will take the easier A meet jobs whenever I can get them. A meet parents do sometimes get pissy about B meet parents working "their" meet because they KNOW the A meet jobs are much easier than the B meet jobs. Too bad so sad!

I mean I would question the wisdom of participating in summer swim if your kid only goes to 2 meets all season so that you’re having to go to meets for no other reason than to meet your volunteer requirements. Props to you for taking the meet volunteering requirement seriously though, most of our parents whose kids only swim at 2 meets all year volunteer at those meets and that’s it and we don’t penalize them for that. It’s not “their” meet, but you can understand why people taking volunteer jobs at meets their kids aren’t at is annoying because then it forces other people to volunteer at meets their kids aren’t swimming at. Volunteering at swim meets is already tenuous and obviously the source of frustration during summer swim, and if it becomes an exercise in people having to volunteer at meets their kids aren’t swimming in that does not help.

This is a weird POV to me. There isn't really a relationship between "meet you are working at" and "meet your kid is swimming in." If my kid doesn't eat pizza, am I not allowed to sign up to help pass out the pizza after practice? For our team, the A meet swimmers also swim the B meets. So if you have an A meet swimmer, you will still be at the B meet, so you can volunteer at either one. Most people don't work ever meet their kids swim in. Some people find the A meet times (Saturday mornings) much more convenient for volunteering than the B meet times (Monday nights). We have to do 5 meets-a lot of kids don't swim in 5 meets all summer. The A meet slots on our team go first, B meets are much harder to staff.

The relationship is I am not attending a meet my kid isn’t swimming in.

We have an HOA pool.
Its walking distance from our house, so its
great to just pop over on saturday morning and knock out a job. I don't see why it matters if my kid is swimming or not.

Um. Some people would rather spend time with their kids rather than work at a swim meet their kid is not swimming in. -DP

I have all summer with my kids. I enjoy the break! You do you, though.

Maybe I’m just burnt from the club season but I would not consider volunteering at a meet my kid isn’t even in to be a break.