Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you can't run the clock or keep the book at one basketball game all season, don't sign your kid up for rec basketball. These are basic jobs someone needs to do for the game to happen, and your $85 fee does not cover hiring the jobs out.

Then *say* that at signup.

Say, parents who don’t have time to score keep or time keep at basketball games are not welcome to sign up their kids. We won’t sign them up. We aren’t doing it to upset you by not meeting your unmet expectations no, we do not have time to do unscheduled volunteer work when it best suits you.

This particular example is common sense, though. Anyone who has ever been to a basketball game knows there is a clock and fouls are tracked. Who exactly do you think will be doing these tasks for your 12 year old's game for $90 a season, if not you, the parents?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:the hiding in the cars thing is pathetic

It seems like something only a deeply burned out parent would do. One who is probably asked to do 10,000 “extra” things and the scoreboard is one too many (they probably need to take a work call or write five emails during the game). They got their kid to the game, that has to be enough.

Do you not think the person doing the asking also has work calls, five emails (some about the league!), and 10,000 extra things to do?

Volunteers don't magically have more bandwidth than everyone else. They just make room.

Magically? No. But they have time to volunteer and they have proactively decided to volunteer at that time.

The person you’re mad at not running the scoreboard? How do you know she didn’t just come from (volunteer) coaching swimming? How do you know the emails she needs to do during the game aren’t themselves volunteer work? If you choose to volunteer for soccer that’s great, you don’t get to choose it for everyone else.

OK, if you don't want to volunteer for soccer and the league is about to fold, then you can find a new soccer league I guess. These things don't magically run themselves and if nobody wants to help that's cool - it'll be pay-to-play on the pre-academy U6 team if you want to learn to dribble a soccer ball. Sorry if you can't afford that or didn't want your 5 year old at 2 practices a week. Nobody cared enough to keep rec going.

Ok, so you guilt the mom out of the car. She runs your scoreboard, and doesn’t do whatever she needed to do after coaching swimming. Now it’s next summer and she drops coaching swimming because she’s fried. That’s fine because at least there is soccer? Or is what she chose to use her time for as valuable as what you chose to use your time for— no summer swim team for your kid at your pool isn’t less of a tragedy than no Rec soccer.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you can't run the clock or keep the book at one basketball game all season, don't sign your kid up for rec basketball. These are basic jobs someone needs to do for the game to happen, and your $85 fee does not cover hiring the jobs out.

Then *say* that at signup.

Say, parents who don’t have time to score keep or time keep at basketball games are not welcome to sign up their kids. We won’t sign them up. We aren’t doing it to upset you by not meeting your unmet expectations no, we do not have time to do unscheduled volunteer work when it best suits you.

Anonymous wrote:yes, it has been rough post Covid trying to get parents to help out.

Everyone still wants their kids to participate though.

I volunteer with our community sports org and we almost had to cancel our rec basketball season last winter because we had 1200 kids signed up to play and only 3 parents total willing to volunteer to help run it (you need a volunteer for each grade/age group). We were also short 20+ coaches and had to get high schoolers and middle schoolers to help out at the last minute because we begged and begged and parents simply would not volunteer to help out.

Following all that work and stress to get the season even started, we couldn't get parents to help out at the games running the clock or the score book. You have a PHD but can't run the basketball clock for a 5th grade house game? People were dropping their kids off for the game and then hiding in their car in the parking lot until the game started to avoid being asked to help out.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:the hiding in the cars thing is pathetic

It seems like something only a deeply burned out parent would do. One who is probably asked to do 10,000 “extra” things and the scoreboard is one too many (they probably need to take a work call or write five emails during the game). They got their kid to the game, that has to be enough.

Do you not think the person doing the asking also has work calls, five emails (some about the league!), and 10,000 extra things to do?

Volunteers don't magically have more bandwidth than everyone else. They just make room.

Anonymous wrote:I'm the PP who serves on the board of the educational non-profit that has mostly retirees on the Board and as officers. All of these stories about youth sports also resonates with me as well. As a younger Board member, I'm stuck between a desire of wanting to make an impact and be involved with the organization, but also having a full time job and family commitments. The older members who have the extra time express frustration that not everyone has the same time to dedicate to the cause that they do, but they also love the fact that there's young blood in our organization.

At the end of the day, I have to remind myself, that no matter what the role is in these volunteer organizations, at the end of the day, we're all volunteers, and we're doing so much more than most of our members who simply pay their dues and expect the world from us.

It seems that volunteer organizations everywhere are suffering from this lack of volunteers with time and bandwidth, but when they do get Board members and volunteers they often get push so hard about volunteering and not doing enough that they end up burning out.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's dual employment. Severe shortage of SAHPs.

+1

Also, the funny thing is, when there were more SAHPs, there were less of these extra school activities. Back in the day, you maybe had one field trip and one class party per year. I'd prefer going back to that myself. I don't think fairs, gardens, etc. are worth the trouble. I'd rather schools just focus on in class learning.

I'm older, but I think the younger generation of parents is onto something.

Agree. Speaking for our public schools, they hardly teach some of the fundamentals like spelling and grammar. I would rather they focus more on learning than have these extra activities.

My mom was a SAHM back in the 80s and she spent zero time at the school volunteering. There weren’t all these extras at the time demanding her time. The SAHMs back then didn’t create a bunch of make work jobs for themselves so they could hang out at school all day. I’m not sure exactly when the shift happened but someone at some point decided kids needed a spirit week with themed days, breakfasts for the teachers and teacher appreciation week with daily activities (provided for by volunteers), fun fests/fall fests/spring whatever, over the top classroom parties with snacks and crafts parents need to figure out, 100 day parties, dress like a book character, etc. When and why did schools decide all of this was necessary?

I also wonder why and when this shift happened. Here are my theories right now:

1) A defensive overreaction to the accusation that having two working parents means parents don't care about kids or schools and aren't "involved." To counteract this working parents got ultra involved and this led to a bunch of new "obligations" that sahms didn't even use to do. Evidence: all the highly involve parents on the frankly over-active PTA at my kid's school are working parents and many work in highly demanding jobs. Why would people with demanding busy jobs take all this on. Well maybe they are trying to prove to the community that having those jobs doesn't negatively impact their kids (for the record it never occurred to me that it did).

2) Related -- as more women decided to work after having kids sahms got defensive and went into overdrive to justify being sahms. Basically the inverse of #1. A lot of people talk about how sahms are lazy or just sponging off their husbands (to be clear I do not think this) so being super active at school and organizing a bunch of stuff in a very visible way is a way to counteract that criticism.

I also think it's possible it's both #1 and #2 and that these phenomenon spur one another on.

3) Teacher and admin burnout. It used to be that some teachers would organize some (of the far fewer and smaller) community events at a school. That's still true in places but I think far less than it used to be. There is so much administrative burden on teachers these days (so many forms and assessments and reports and IEPs and professional development obligations etc.) that most teachers truly do not have the time or energy to do something like this even if it's once a year. And also because of #1 and #2 parents are more overzealous than they used to be and teachers get tired of dealing with these intense parents who always want more more more. So they opt out altogether and this shifts more of the burden onto parents who are ill-equipped to handle it.

Those are my theories anyway. It's the only way I can explain why parents are now expected to volunteer like 10x more than they used to while also working more than they used to.

Anonymous wrote:If you can't run the clock or keep the book at one basketball game all season, don't sign your kid up for rec basketball. These are basic jobs someone needs to do for the game to happen, and your $85 fee does not cover hiring the jobs out.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:yes, it has been rough post Covid trying to get parents to help out.

Everyone still wants their kids to participate though.

I volunteer with our community sports org and we almost had to cancel our rec basketball season last winter because we had 1200 kids signed up to play and only 3 parents total willing to volunteer to help run it (you need a volunteer for each grade/age group). We were also short 20+ coaches and had to get high schoolers and middle schoolers to help out at the last minute because we begged and begged and parents simply would not volunteer to help out.

Following all that work and stress to get the season even started, we couldn't get parents to help out at the games running the clock or the score book. You have a PHD but can't run the basketball clock for a 5th grade house game? People were dropping their kids off for the game and then hiding in their car in the parking lot until the game started to avoid being asked to help out.

Most parents asked point blank will help out. A general call to action via email is likely to be ignored. My husband and I won’t commit to coaching a whole season because we can’t make every practice time and game, but we have filled in for an absent coach, been sideline refs, run scoreboards, helped with concessions, cleaned up the fields or whatever else is asked specifically. I think the highschoolers make great coaches too. The kids look up to them and they have no kids on the team so aren’t biased. Also helps those kids build their community service activities. They are a great untapped resource.

Not the first quoted poster, but another person who helps run a league and I disagree with the bolded. Some parents will volunteer when asked point blank. Some will laugh in your face and act like you couldn't possibly understand their lives (news flash: our family is pretty busy too). Oddly enough it is often the parent with 7 kids and a full time job whose spouse also works who will say yes and the parent with 2 kids and a more flexible job who will say no. Not always, but often.

Also our permitting county wouldn't let us run practice with no one over 18 in charge. High schoolers are great assistant coaches and yes the kids love them, but we can't use them as head coaches. The roles our organization has the most trouble filling all require the person doing them to be over 18. It's not fair to ask a high school kid to be the league scheduler and I don't think I can turn our taxes over to one.

But…you don’t understand their lives.

You’re straight out saying you don’t understand how someone with two kids could be busy and someone with seven has time. Things like a parent dying of cancer come to mind as reasons I, a parent of one child with enough seniority to have flexibility at work, would have spent a soccer game in my car talking to doctors and family members and not running a score board.

Would I have laughed in your face? Probably not but I also wouldn’t think that you, a total stranger, were entitled to know my mother was dying and I was trying to figure out how to maximize my child’s time with her. People do not owe you.

No they don't owe me. But by signing their kid up to play in the league I'm helping run, I would think they should feel like they can give a little time. Or at least not act like their time is so much more precious than mine when they also don't know me. And the laughter is a more common reaction than you might think. Just look at how many people in this thread look down on volunteers - while simultaneously saying it's unfair to take advantage of unpaid labor.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:the hiding in the cars thing is pathetic

It seems like something only a deeply burned out parent would do. One who is probably asked to do 10,000 “extra” things and the scoreboard is one too many (they probably need to take a work call or write five emails during the game). They got their kid to the game, that has to be enough.

Do you not think the person doing the asking also has work calls, five emails (some about the league!), and 10,000 extra things to do?

Volunteers don't magically have more bandwidth than everyone else. They just make room.

Magically? No. But they have time to volunteer and they have proactively decided to volunteer at that time.

The person you’re mad at not running the scoreboard? How do you know she didn’t just come from (volunteer) coaching swimming? How do you know the emails she needs to do during the game aren’t themselves volunteer work? If you choose to volunteer for soccer that’s great, you don’t get to choose it for everyone else.

OK, if you don't want to volunteer for soccer and the league is about to fold, then you can find a new soccer league I guess. These things don't magically run themselves and if nobody wants to help that's cool - it'll be pay-to-play on the pre-academy U6 team if you want to learn to dribble a soccer ball. Sorry if you can't afford that or didn't want your 5 year old at 2 practices a week. Nobody cared enough to keep rec going.