swim parents - "they work hard" - the real world. really.

this isn't some little town, it's a suburban dallas 5a and i love the "they work hard" card being played

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/091909dnmetgarswim.3afcab5.html

 

Are they costing them scholarships too?

 

This is where I have problems with the tryouts as well, if this truly is the case.

" . . . as 40 students signed up for the team as a PE class. None were told there would be tryouts until after school started. Tryouts were Sept. 3. A week later, 28 students were told they would be cut.
Those students were told they would have to drop the class and substitute in another, four weeks into the semester, Brewster said."

If you can sign up for the class as a PE class where you get credits for it, then it isn't an extra curricular class, it shouldn't be viewed as a competitive swim team. You want a competitive swim team then put it together outside of the reaches of the syllabus. Where I went to school, the basketball and volleyball teams sure didn't receive credits as a PE class, and thus if they needed to make cuts (it was a small school and had difficulty usually getting enough students together for the different teams) they could have made cuts.

 

Yes, and Olympic gold medals.

 

Beef - in Texas high schools, extracurricular teams often have a PE class associated with them so the players can get fulfill their PE requirements without having to take a redundant gym class. It also serves as extra practice/video/coaching time. If you plan on trying out for the soccer/football/swim/baseball team, you sign up for the class, and you're transferred to a regular gym class if you don't make it or get kicked off during the season.

 

OK, fair enough, far different system up here then where competing on the schools teams is all completely extra curricular and does not count towards a PE class.

If that's the system then, well that's the system. ll I can really say then is if there was a change to the way they were doing things after a long time of doing it one way the least they could have done was give the students a heads up before registration, other than that tough shit.

 

Unless it's a major financial burden or something, I don't see the big deal with letting anyone who wants to play on a team be on the team in high school. Even if you have to put the kids you would have cut on the junior junior varsity, get some goober parent to coach them and never let them make eye contact with the real players.

 

I disagree. This is more of what I call the "everybody gets a trophy" approach. When I was in high school, I had to try out. Playing sports wasn't an entitlement.

 

When I was in high school, some sports had cuts and some didn't. Sports where the roster size needed to be limited, basketball, baseball, hockey, etc. had cuts. Others like wrestling, track and football didn't have cuts. The best kids were varsity; the rest were JV. In the case of wrestling (the one sport that I had experience with), it was pretty much self-selecting. The workouts were really hard and if you weren't up to what was being done in practice, you cut yourself.

 

Normal school-sponsored athletics in Missouri don't give academic credit, but individual students can petition for physical education credit if they are part of the local figure skating club, hockey team or are a gymnast at the junior elite level. Basically, it has to be an individual sport and the credit has to be petitioned before the school board and approved.

 

Swimming sucks.

 

We can trash parents all we want, but in this case they have a point. After their kids had already signed up for the class, one they expected to stay for the semester on a team that had never made cuts and did not announce that policy was changing, the school turns around and says not only are you not on the swim team, but you have to take a different class in a few weeks. In this case, the school deserves all the shit it gets from these parents.