Be an involved parent

My husband coaches travel basketball teams. Three to be exact. And two middle school teams.

We are planning a trip to Las Vegas to participate in a 5 day tournament at the end of July. I have have given out the dates, hotel accomodation information and costs since March. About once a week, I've handed out a flyer or memo that had this information.

I've given the information so many times, some parents roll their eyse when they see me coming with "another piece of paper".

We have a block of 30 rooms set aside for our teams at the hotel. So I call to see how many familes have made reservations... 11. That includes my two rooms.

As I start to question parents, I get, "oh yeah, I have to call and do that" or, "oh, I've never recieved that information". Or my personal favorite, "I never really read any of your memo's, so I didn't know what I was supposed to do".

Some of there parents don't want to go. They want to send their child with me, so we can be responsible for their bad assed boy for 5 days. They don't want to take vacation time for a basketball tournament in Las Vegas. Most of them just don't want to pay for the hotel and tournament fees.

Why not? I have to!! And I'm not going to be pulling money out of my pocket to feed your kid because you gave them $20.00 for the week!

But, what kills me is that these kids have been looking forward to this tournament for almost a year. They are so excited. And now some of them are getting really down because they may not get to go.

Now I feel obligated to reserve rooms and figure out how to pay for them so some of these boys can go. Part of the reason we did this team was to reach out in our community and touch kids who usually couldn't participate. We try not to make money an issue.
But it really pisses me off when some parents don't even make a small effort to be there for their children.

I will never understand why people have kids and then choose not to be involved with them.