OILF, our situation here is actually common for our area so please bear with me as I explain. DW teaches in an inner city school system. Since she is technically a city employee, we have to live within the city limits. However, the school system is in both academic and fiscal emergency. It has been for years due to poor Administrative decisions but that's another topic of discussion. Our state allows students to go to other school districts which have open enrollment if the school the student would normally attend is in academic emergency. That being said, neither school system will bus students outside of their school district nor are open enrollment students allowed to ride the busses. Unfortunately, DD won't be driving for another year so I really don't have a choice about picking her up and taking her back since the school requires all students to be out of the building by 3 for liability and security reasons. The school system does have after hours programs but they are held in the elementary building which requires bussing which again, she's not allowed to do.
We live in what was once voted in a USA Today poll as the city most likely to never economically recover (old steel town that had all our eggs in one basket). Our city is also routinely in the top 5 cities per capita for murder and has won the national murder capital award on numerous occasions. Therefore, even though many of her team mates/friends drive, very few can afford the insurance and gas to put in a car let alone a car itself. Needless to say, I'm not leaving DD to stand outside the school in that neighborhood either. The softball fields they practice/play games on are about 3 miles away in a city park. In this day and age, I don't want the kids walking there through even worse neighborhoods. They are nowhere near as bad as the inner city neighborhoods where a majority of the crimes happen but it's still a pretty rough section of town and there's too many whackos out there.
With all that said, the school DD goes to is a 20-25 minute drive in traffic from our house. So figure it out. All games start at 5 with the players required to be there (home games) by 4 for warm ups so that leaves me an hour and 15 minutes between pick-up at school and warm-ups with a 50 minute round trip drive to the house. The away games, I don't have to worry about because the bus leaves from the school by 3 or earlier.
2 to 2 1/2 hour games depending on defense and pitching. Some are faster but the average around here is 2 hours or so. The game's over by 7. Load the bus and get back to school by 7:45 assuming that their opponent is here in town. Some are an hour and a half away or further. By the time we get home its 8:15 on a good night from the away games. Practice and home game nights we still don't get home until 7:30 or so and that's assuming practice ends on time or the games don't go into extra innings as it did last night.
As far as the food goes, yes, when traveling on the bus the booster club provides good food for the girls on the way. But for home games when she has to be out of the building, what would you suggest? We would be spending all of our time driving to and from the school/fields if we went home to eat and the quickie marts and grocery stores are more expensive. I have to get her anyway so what's the difference if we stay in the area and go to a Subway for 1/2 hour?
It's nice that you provide a coach to work with your pitchers at their convenience after school. Unfortunately for us, the coaches are all teachers at the HS or MS and by the time they finish grading papers, change, etc. (i.e. HC has to go pick-up her 3 month old DD at daycare and drop her off a mom's) they are pushing to make it to the fields or gym on-time to begin with.
By the way, I usually end up with several of her teammates also. As I've mentioned before, many don't have vehicles and the few that do, take the other girls on a first-come first serve-basis to the fields. In our state, teens are limited to a certain number of other teens that are allowed to be in the vehicle with them at one time so there are usually a few left standing there.
Everyone's situation is different. As I said before, there are any number of reasons people live where they have to live which creates difficult circumstances for them. I don't really want to live where we do but it happens to be the nicest part of this town, if you could call having a 9 YO girl shot and killed by an errant bullet last week while sitting at her dining room table doing homework, nice. However, because of DW's job, we don't have a choice. We have to live within the city limits and no other school district will hire her due to her having 24 years of experience and a Masters degree. So as a branch of our proud armed services say, we adapt, we overcome and we survive doing the best we can for our kids by trying to give them every opportunity to thrive.
Just because you may not have seen these circumstances in your area doesn't mean they don't exist nor are they exaggerated as you may think. My amount of involvement, although unheard of in your area, is quite common in ours. Many students from the city attend this school system on open enrollment. This amount of parental involvement in this area is not only common, but, IMO, and the opinion of many other parents in our area, necessary, as is evidenced by the number of parents who do the same thing as I do.
So if DD were to still be pitching, it's quite obvious by our circumstances that it would truly be a struggle to find time to practice and stay sharp during the 6 weeks of HS ball unless she got circle time in games.
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