Reply to Are there any minorities, cool, sporty boys in Boy Scouts or Scouts?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My son was in scouts and completed his eagle rank. His troop was primarily white, but I think that varies from troop to troop. I know there's one troop in South Arlington that's associated with a Filipino church and virtually everyone is Filipino.

As for sporty kids, it is harder to be involved in scouts and do a sport with a big time commitment. I would ask the scoutmaster what their policy is on kids missing meetings for sports. Some will be more accommodating than others. My son plays a HS sport and it was hard to fit in scouts, especially things like getting 20 camping nights to get the camping MB or doing the leadership positions that are required for rank advancement. My son took on leadership positions and tried to get in all his camping nights during his sport's offseason. In his troop I would say that only about 25% of the kids were high school athletes. It does tend to be more popular among kids who don't participate in sports.[/quote]
Both my sons are Eagle Scouts and I agree. Most scoutmasters allow flexibility with sports. A few are rigid and don’t like making accommodations for sports and make scouts choose - which usually results in the child quitting scouts. My sons’ scoutmaster was happy to have them participate in scouting in whatever way they could - even if it meant showing up to meeting still on there sport attire covered in mud or showing up late to a campout. 
That said… 20 nights camping is actually really easy to do. One summer camp (6 nights) and 7 weekend campouts. My youngest completed that within his first year of scouts. Spread out over middle school - that’s only 2-3 campouts a year. Or if they go all the way through high school, it’s just one weekend campout a year. 
For those that want to earn Eagle, I recommend encouraging the scout to focus on it during middle school before other things compete for their time.[/quote]

This is really true about focusing on it in middle school. DS started at the end of seventh grade.  Neither DH or I had any experience with scouts, and I thought that as long as he went to the meetings and campouts and he and DH volunteered for things that he would kind of naturally rank up.

It took me a year to realize that you have to a bunch of stuff on your own and use the meetings to get that stuff signed off.  He and I worked to get him up to first class now at the end of ninth grade, but it’s going to be a challenge for him to get to Eagle.  He just has a lot of other stuff going on.

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