Well at our school it *IS* a year round team. They get basically Nov-Feb off. Start back up 4xweek in the spring and then 3-4x week in the summer. You are allowed to not come in the spring if you have a spring sport. And you are allowed to miss in the summer for travel tournaments. And he'd prefer if you scheduled any actual vacation around the 3 weeks off we are allowed each summer. Luckily our vacations are pretty much just travel tournaments so that's not even a problem.Strong disagree with this.
Kids should be encouraged to participate in other activities, yes, but when you make a commitment for a season and are told that should be your priority, that needs to be your priority. This isn't a year-round team. HS ball is a short-term commitment. Nobody is saying she has to dedicate her entire life to the sport.
Why should every other school activity take priority (remember, choosing Activity A over Activity B means you're prioritizing Activity A)? And why should the coach just be OK with kids missing whenever something else comes up?
My policy is that softball comes first after academics (band is a class, which makes it academic). It's only a bad policy if you think it's fine to have 6 kids at practice because the rest of them found other school hobbies to take up their time everyday.
Also ROTC is a class as well which I would consider something academic. The fact that she is missing leadership meetings for softball shows her commitment to softball.
And not sure it even matters but she did talk to her HC - and he's "allowing" her and her friend to march in the parade but they have to rush back to try to get there in time for some practice. And I was never worried about any penalty for her. I'm still anxious every day to see if she is even playing - so why it would bother her if she had to sit a game? She sat for one game in our double-header this weekend. That's not even an issue.
Edited to add: We have 3 freshmen on our varsity team who start every game. They all play for nationally ranked teams - are nationally ranked players. We've heard two of them admit that they wish they could quit HS softball already or not do it next year - they won't because their parents would never let them. But we're not even 2 months into the season and these girls are exhausted. We had 4 games scheduled for this week - which means DD is gone from 6am-9pm. Luckily the fourth got moved to next week. But when do kids get their homework done? My kid is up to past midnight almost every night trying to finish things - and then you have teachers who want things done by 11:59pm. These teachers don't care that you have a softball game. We had a digital day today so DD was able to actually wash her SB uniforms and her ROTC uniforms - there just isn't enough time in the day for SB to take up 1/2 of it. I don't know what other high schools do or how much they practice. Maybe I'm just complaining for no reason and everyone has the same issues but it's just a lot.
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