Reply to Arlington proposing to close county gymnastics program

Forum Index » Sports General Discussion

Reply to "Arlington proposing to close county gymnastics program"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]$13/class is absolute insanity.  DPR could easily increase that and still meet demand.  Also, I agree about higher fees for out of county residents.[/quote]The same is true of AAC.  If youth sports that don't recover fees were looked at holistically, there's a way to spread this out more fairly.[/quote]

Why should costs for a competitive gymnastics team be spread out more fairly?  What's fair about that?

AAC and competitive gymnastics shouldn't be run out of the County at all.

[b]The role of a parks and rec department is in the title.  Rec[/b].[/quote]

I imagine you don’t realize that your tax dollars are also subsidizing other competitive sports. ATB, Storm, and ASA (i.e. travel baseball and soccer) get priority field status and discounted field rates. In those instances there is a partnership with a private organization (so that the county doesn’t handle hiring/employing coaches, registration and tryouts, etc.) So it is disingenuous to pretend DPR exists solely for rec level purposes.

Now perhaps there needs to be a spin off nonprofit that pairs with the gymnastics program so that Arlington County isn’t responsible for the oversight and management of the competitive team. Based on what I’ve heard from a friend with a kid on the competitive team (plus what I’ve read here) it sounds like the county isn’t doing a super job. But this type of partnership hasn’t been proposed, the county is jumping straight to elimination. Why? Other sports are supported so why not gymnastics.

There is ample demand for rec gymnastics and they could add ways to meet that demand while pairing with a nonprofit that could help oversee the kids getting funneled to a higher level.  [/quote]

It doesn't appear the problem is hiring for the competition team. While yes there is demand for a rec gymnastics team, there does not appear to be enough coaches for the rec level. I've looked at the website for the competition teams and they have a lot of coaches. I'm sure some of them also coach rec but it does not appear all of them do. My guess is that a lot of coaches just prefer to work with older, competitive gymnasts and have less interest in teaching fundamentals to younger kids, many of whom might have little or no skill or talent for the sport. While I understand that as a personal choice, it doesn't make sense for the county to fund a program with such minimal interest in teaching young kids new to the sport.

So even if they did what you suggest, the county would still be struggling to fill instructor spots for the rec program and they'd still be cancelling classes and leaving the gym out of use a lot of the time. If you can't fix that problem, the competition team doesn't actually matter. It's only worthwhile for the county to support the teams (even just by providing the facility, even if the teams are largely run by boosters and self funded) if they are on top of a functioning rec program that fills that facility. Without staffing, you can't have a functioning rec program.

No one has explained how you fix that. Where are the instructors who are going to come make the rec program work? Maybe if the gymnastics boosters could identify a pool of qualified instructors who are ready to take on these jobs, that would be a step in the right direction.[/quote]

The boosters themselves many who are ex gymnasts have applied for jobs and not called by the county. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics