Notre Dame football recruit dies in fall from hotel balcony

Rick's point is exactly where I'm coming from.

If the kid goes to Notre Dame, gets drunk and falls off the building, you can't point to the parents. If the kid goes to Pittsburgh for opening day, gets drunk and falls off a parking structure, you can't blame the parents. Kids experiment with alcohol. It happens. You can't put them in a glass case.

But there is only one reason a 17-year-old kid goes to Panama City with his friends - to drink his face off.

And no, I don't think you can sign off on that and not bear the great brunt of responsibility when it goes wrong.

 

Um....the main high school in my town currently has the baseball AND softball teams playing at tournaments in Florida for their Spring Break (against teams from all around here. Why you'd travel 13 hours to play a team from an hour away, I don't know.)

 

That's a completely different situation. It's an organized school activity, not a vacation, and is undoubtedly supervised.

 

Reminds me of a story about my old high school's spring baseball trip a few years ago.

Coach and his assistant are having dinner at the end of a day in a hotel restaurant. The players are all in their rooms for the night.

The coaches are having a beer with dinner. Not pounding beers, mind you, but having a beer with dinner.

A parent of a player sees this and reports the coaches to school officials, they're later suspended and subsequently lose the coaching gigs.

Guess what? The parent who turned them in had been complaining bitterly all season because his kid didn't start, but was clearly an undiscovered all-state player.

 

No, it is not the only reason, and I humbly submit that some of the kids on the trip probably didn't touch an ounce of booze.

This is a big part of what I find to be good parenting: Having positive, realistic expectations for your kids - such as following the law - and expecting they live up to them. Expecting a kid to be dry at 17 is <i>not</i> unrealistic. It really isn't.

 

My graduating class of 275 sent 86 kids to Cancun. Nearly a third of the senior class went.

No parents, no teachers, no chaperones. It was a long-standing tradition for the seniors to go on Spring Break to Cancun. Rarely if ever did parents go, unless one girl couldn't go without Mom or Dad.

These things were never organized through the school or anything beyond kids planning it out before class or at lunch. But that's just one high school..... 86 kids from one class.... that's not including the juniors that went.

I'm sure this happens everywhere.

 

I think it is bad form to drink in public when you are on a trip with a team. Very bad.

 

I'm reading a book right now called 'Microtrends' by Mark Penn. Yeah- that Mark Penn.

Anyway, he talks about how 90,000 more boys are born (in the U.S.? Worldwide? Can't remember) than girls. But by the time we're in our 30s, women outnumber men.

What happens?

It's what scientists call the "testosterone storm."

He cites a Harvard study that says boys age 15-24 are 4 to 5 times more likely to die than girls of the same age.

 

I would never let my teenage child (if I had one) go on a spring break that wasn't part of a school-sanctioned group. Way too much that can go wrong and too many bad people ready to exploit the ritual.

 

You are shameless.