more blues than belly laughs

Sometimes when I find life incredibly frustrating, my blog allows me to vent...and you all are the happy recipients if you choose to read it. We are entering the tail end of the varsity field hockey season here at our local high school and I have to admit I am counting down the minutes. Let's run down the list of responsiblities outside the actual GAME that we (the parents) are responsible for:

1. Team Dinners.The night before each away game, the parents are asked to host a team dinner, where we feed all 40 girls at our home so the girls have time to bond and socialize. Yep, 40. Maddie makes an appearance, eats in 10 minutes, and has us pick her up. So much for bonding on a night of homework with 5 AP classes.

2. Sister bags. Every away game, we give a girl on the junior varsity team a bag of goodies, candy (we are talking movie theater size), snacks, drinks, and in past years, little pencil games, yoyos, silly putty, tattoos...it has become a competition of who has the best bag. No surprize there...they all play sports.

3. The new coach introduced field hockey homework. I suppose we need to tackle that after Maddie finishes her calc packet with 195 calc problems. And her AP Bio assignment.
She also thought bonding with the other team is important. So we hosted a 'tea' after our game with Arundel (where they beat us 7-1)-everyone brought in drinks, fruits, snacks, and granola bars. Girls walked up, shoved granola bars in their backpacks, and left the field.

4. Senior Night. Seniors are honored their last regular season game. That would include glitzy posters with their pics on them, flowers for each girl, a balloon arch, a vat of crab soup that we sell at the snack shack..all seniors and their parents get it for free(parents usually make cream of crab soup-a highlight. This year our boosters, who support all chesapeake sports, got it at a local seafood place and it was vegetable soup that ran out before the game was half over), pictures, and a gift. A previous year, they were given Pandora bracelets (this won't happen again because we don't have a budget for it because we spent the budget on bracelets).

5. End of season party. Not so bad..we rent a hall and parents bring food. But apparently the tradition is to give each girl an ornament to remember the season by. Never mind that perhaps there are girls who are not Christian. And that each ornament is made by yet another parent at the cost of 4-5 a piece. 200.00. for a trinket that ends up at the bottom of the gym bag.

I am not even sharing positives about the actual sport, where it seems winning is much more important than the team spirit. I know they play at a different level on varsity, but why have a group of 6 girls on the sidelines who only play for 2 minutes? Because the girls who stay in the game for the entire time are club level players. And unless you are willing to send your child to a club level group for a cost of 1000 dollars or more, you are out of luck on the high school level.
Give me tennis. Any day.