Irate Parents

I have a meeting tonight and I’m somewhat anxious about it. It’s a pre baseball season “These Are The Rules, Follow Them” type of meeting.

If there’s one thing that bugs me, it is a parent who is more interested in justifying her child’s rule breaking, and getting mad at the person in authority about it, than she is in making sure her child is doing the right thing. (Since I said that, I am going to be put to the test on this!) I had a parent do that to me last year and I was ready to quit my duties, pull my kids out of that organization and go do something else. I’m not sure any child’s sport is worth that. I stuck it out, though, and here we are again, at the beginning of another season.

Something that came out of that experience has been a desire by the president and other board members, myself included, to iron out what the rules are, to get the board members on the “same page” regarding enforcement, and to get that information from the board to the parents in no uncertain terms. We now have an explicit code of conduct, something we haven’t consistently and uniformly required parents and players to read and sign, as well as a list of facility rules.

We haven’t done anyone any favors by not taking care of this sooner, but it has been addressed in the past. The president tells the crowd what the rules are during the opening day ceremony but it seems that no one listens. The meeting tonight is in place of the “rules recitation”. Parents will be required to read and sign the code of conduct and turn it in to the team managers tonight.
Mr. Nicklebee made a suggestion regarding the least fun job–field duty (kind of like playground duty only baseball park, and not just kids but adults, too). He said that what we need to do is take a look at the calendar and plan on having twice or three times as many board members doing field duty when there is going to be a bigger than usual crowd, walk around together in uniform and, as a group, approach rule violators. He said that once people realize we’re not just lone enforcers walking around by ourselves, but unified and watching, the word will get out and people will respect the rules we have in place just because it’s not one person but a group of people willing to kick them out of the park. It would be nice if we could get that kind of cooperation but I’m not sure that schedules permit. We’ll see.

Regardless of whether we can do that or not, I will NEVER do field duty by myself again EVER. I think the only reason that woman got in my face was because she thought she could bully me into backing down. She almost did, but she didn’t know that.

I don’t want to give the impression that our organization is full of hellions or that we’re only interested in making sure people follow rules just for the sake of rule-following. There are certain safety issues that most people follow but others, a small percentage of the whole, make life challenging. We have a good thing going; we just need to be able to adequately handle the exceptions. We have a great time overall. It is a lot of work and takes a lot of willing help but we enjoy ourselves.

On a lighter note, Homer was standing next to me watching the flailing mother and trying not to laugh. I thought I was going to throw up or get beaten up or BOTH, and he was trying not to laugh! lol I gave him permission to go ahead and laugh [if there is but hopefully there never will be a] next time.

Lord, please give our family what we need to honor You in all things and not to have a nervous breakdown thinking about things beyond our (my!) control.  In Jesus’ name, Amen.