This really burns me up. Can’t get the baseball parents and families to stop smoking and littering April 22, 2009
Posted by irisia in mom, this makes me REALLY angry!.Tags: athletic association, athletics, baseball, baseball parents, kids athletics, littering, parents smoking, ridiculous parents, rude smokers, sports parents, tough parents
4 comments
I’m on the board of the town athletic association. It’s currently in my sport’s off-season but I still go to the board meetings to try to support the really strong baseball program. We are lucky that Kate’s school is host to our athletic association’s baseball program. And, I am very lucky that I live right behind the school – a hop, skip, and a short trail away.
This is my first year on the board of the Athletic Association so it’s my first chance to voice my opinion about the terrible issues with littering and smoking at the ball fields during ball season. There are 2 ball fields that get used and I am not kidding, I have gone around after a weekend of ball games and picked up several garbage bags full of litter and cigarette butts. The parents, families, fans of the players literally just throw their bottles, cans, cups, plates, and wrappers right on the ground. There are garbage cans not even a stones throw away and they just drop their trash to the ground. The trash drops the trash.
So, smoking is strictly prohibited on the school grounds. The baseball fans/parents (whoever comes to watch the game) still smoke as much as they like. Sometimes they step a few paces from the ballfields or they stand near their car but they still smoke in a smoking prohibited area. Then, worse! They throw the butts on the ground. The butts throw the butts. Why are smokers so rude? How do they have so much gall?
So, at the Athletic Association meeting last week, I proposed that we do a couple things to stop the problem. Here’s where it gets interesting:
I proposed:
1) that we have a mandatory trash clean up day with all ball players. Most likely if they have to clean up their own trash, they’ll have a better appreciation of what people do behind them.
answer: no we can’t do that
2) that if someone reports to a coach that one of the parents from their team was smoking – then the player does not play the next game.
answer: we will get sued. CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS? CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS? So, what they’re saying is that smoking is prohibited and if we try to punish the child whose parent smokes, then that parent can sue us because their kid sat out a game because the parent can’t follow rules. What in the heck has this world come to? The trash can throw the trash and the butts can drop the butts but the rest of us just have to sit around and watch them or the trashy lowlifes will sue us.
This is the type of crap that makes the good folks not want to participate in programs and then the programs go downhill. How can we ever expect to grow as an organization unless we can have what it takes to enforce rules and ask humans to act like human beings and not like animals?
