A little creativity helps....

Does this describe your church: we have a gymnasium, athletic field, church hall, or other facility that kids could use for sports, but unfortunately, all the members of our congregation are over 70 years old and cannot do the needed maintenance on it?

Well, HERE is a solution I saw today in one of the Hartford Courant blogs.

Nice thing about this one: doing community service is a great way for people to make amends to society -- why not see if there are people sentenced to community service in YOUR locale who would be able to work on maintaining your recreational facility.

(No, I'm NOT recommending that you turn operation of your recreation program over to offenders. Staffing the program is different from maintaining the facility. We'll talk more about staffing opportunities in a forthcoming post.)

First-generation Chinese-Americans

The New York Times had an article today dealing with generational differences in attitudes about the appropriateness of sports for young people.

If you have Chinese-American families -- especially first generation -- in the population you are trying to reach, you will find this article useful. I'm wondering if it will also prove to be instructive for other immigrant ethnic groups that find themselves trapped in the "seamstress/restaurant" cycle and are eager to break out.

Free.

Interesting. I did not know THIS about Little League, and I suspect that few others knew it either.

People making a buck (or a lot of bucks) off kids' sports has become pretty endemic, I'm afraid. So much so that, even though the publicity for our church summer soccer program says "free" and even though the website says "free", virtually every parent who has showed up with their offspring has asked me how much it costs and if a check is okay. Furthermore, they seem to expect to have to pay for the free tee-shirt we give each participant. (They don't, of course -- generous parishioners underwrite them.)

I suspect that many churches that offer sports for young people sometimes are tempted to consider them a revenue stream. Their logic probably runs along the lines of "Well, worship is free, but this isn't."

Let the founder of Little League -- and Jesus himself -- be your guide instead.

No space; no facility? How about jump rope?

Probably the most frequent excuse (and that's what it is, I'm afraid) I hear why churches cannot possibly have physical activity for their young people is that they do not have any room. All their outside space is taken up by parking lots (if they have any space outside their four walls to begin with), and there's just no room inside to play basketball or something along those lines.

Well, my usual rejoinder to those complaints is "ping pong" -- but an article in today's New York Times suggested another one: JUMP ROPE!.

Okay, you'll probably never be able to develop jump rope in your parish to the level the kids in New York City have taken Double Dutch, but it's definitely a low-cost sport to start with.

Also, presumably you realize that boxers traditionally jump rope for conditioning and coordination purposes -- so it works for boys as well.

Give it a try! Let us know how it works out!

Getting closer to home....

Pine Plains, NY is not in the area from which we currently draw parishioners here at Trinity Lime Rock (CT), but it is only one town away from where our Senior Warden and her husband live.

So, when I saw this headline from the Poughkeepsie, NY newspaper this morning, it seemed too close to home to neglect to post.

Yes, schools ARE cutting back athletic programs -- but not just on the interscholastic level, like Pine Plains. They are also yielding to budgetary concerns and cutting back throughout the schools. You can bet that if the Pine Plains school district is cutting back their interscholastic sports, there is little money in the budget for badminton birdies, ping pong balls, volleyball nets, or for the people who bring tools like these into the presence of the kids.

When schools -- and government in general -- falls short, there is both an opportunity and an obligation for churches to help.

Certainly not just soccer!

While we're very proud of the kids who have developed their soccer skills in our Summer Soccer program, we're now beginning to think that perhaps we're making a bit of a mistake by confining our efforts to soccer.

Likely due to the economy, we're seeing the local travel soccer team unable to fill what are normally two very popular age levels: U-12 girls and U-12 boys. There simply won't be a team for the few U-12 girls who tried out, because there's already a full team of U-14 girls. The few U-12 boys will get to play up with the U-14s, and thereby we will have a U-14 boys team.

With families pulling back on expenses like travel soccer, we also see them pulling back on activities that might lead to future expenditures on travel soccer. And, as a result, our attendance has been off this summer.

Today, I asked the kids what they thought we should do. (By the way, asking the kids is always a good idea in this kind of thing. We'll go so far as to say that if you do NOT ask the kids, you are setting yourself up for failure bigtime. But that's another post.)

The little kids didn't have much in the way of opinions. One six year old girl suggested football, and a five year old boy agreed with her.

The big kids were more forthcoming. Lacrosse (one girl said it is the fastest growing youth sport in America right now) was a popular suggestion. So was beach volleyball. So were ordinary volleyball, badminton, horseshoes, and ... soccer.

Anyway, we're floating a trial balloon on this one, both inside the parish and outside it. Namely: what do you say that we call it Summer SPORTS at Trinity Lime Rock next summer, and we do what most people want to do each Sunday?

Where do YOU think we are going to go with this?

Here's an add-on

No, this post isn't specifically about kids and sports and church. Instead, it's about having a church that's sufficiently open to the idea of sports that it can not just accept the notion that sports are good for kids, and what's good for kids is also good for church, but expand on that as well.

In the photo above, Emily DiMartino is honored during the main Sunday worship service for winning the gold medal in the 1500 meter speed walk for women age 60-69 in the US Transplant Games for 2008. Emily took the opportunity to ask the congregation to complete organ donor cards -- a great way to continue giving after one's death; what a great living illustration of the Golden Rule!

(Thanks to John Lloyd for the photo!)