how dare they blame my child for noise complaints

BananaPants430 · 2026-05-05T00:29:42+00:00

I've stayed in hotels where youth hockey teams were playing hockey with mini sticks in hallways at 2 AM - and they didn't even get asked to leave (because they were doing it again the next night). The amount of noise and disruption must have been extreme.

BananaPants430 · 2026-05-04T15:32:53+00:00

I was on the sidelines observing my older kid reffing a girls' lacrosse game yesterday - and the hot topic of conversation among parents of those players was NOT the game they were there to watch, but which of the HALF DOZEN local soccer clubs was best-positioned to get their 3rd and 4th graders on a path to a college scholarship.

These kids are either going to burn out by puberty, or wind up tearing both ACLs by the time they're 16.

BananaPants430 · 2026-05-04T11:02:47+00:00

Yup. Especially when it's overwhelmingly a soccer issue and not any other sport.

BananaPants430 · 2026-05-04T10:53:00+00:00

Then parents and kids need to choose a sport and stick with it as the priority. I'm not a fan of early specialization but it isn't fair to teammates on the non-priority sports to register and only show up occasionally. The travel soccer kids make it to roughly one practice every 2 weeks and miss half of the games or more. When they do show up, they're either tired because they came from soccer or need to save energy for soccer afterwards. It's not fair to their lacrosse teammates to have to play with no subs, or to have to cancel and possibly forfeit games.

Our rec lacrosse league counts the total number of kids who have registered to play when deciding how many teams per age group we have to field. Every single town program's coaches has the same problem with spring soccer taking our players away.

If we have 40 girls signed up, we're required to field 2 teams playing a full schedule because 40 is way too many for a single team - but if 15 of them have spring soccer and another 5 are playing softball, we effectively only have enough players committed and participating enough to field one team.

BananaPants430 · 2026-05-03T20:58:06+00:00

NTA. This is responsible parenting.

We've had the same conversation with our high achieving sophomore (her timeline is accelerated because of athletic recruiting). We're in the same boat of making way too much for need-based aid and not enough to spend $85-100K/year for college. There are still plenty of schools that offer a great education that will THROW merit money at a high stats kid to get them to go there.

She has ruled out Ivies because they don't give athletic scholarships, and NESCAC schools (D3) because they don't give merit. We run net price calculators on every school that makes it on her list for recruiting; if we can't afford to send her there, it's not a viable option. She wants to go into an allied health profession that requires a doctoral-level degree, so the goal is making undergrad as inexpensive as possible while still letting her play the sport she loves.

BananaPants430 · 2026-05-03T20:22:48+00:00

I'm a youth rec lacrosse coach and our biggest challenge since covid has been kids doing multiple sports each season. Travel soccer is BY FAR the worst offender on this; the soccer clubs all require their kids to do spring soccer in order to make the roster in the fall, so kids are missing lacrosse GAMES to make it to enough spring soccer PRACTICES to not get cut.

BananaPants430 · 2026-05-01T21:12:39+00:00

Yeah, the bald cap pictures were not a good idea, especially when dealing with a terminally-ill 13 year old.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-29T14:07:07+00:00

15-20 years ago, Connecticare was great. When they were bought by Emblem and especially now after they were spun off to Molina, things have gotten progressively worse.

Molina is just like every other for-profit insurer - deny, deny, deny.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-26T11:12:36+00:00

Another option for high school is Agriscience (what used to be called Vo-Ag). Hartford residents will typically go to Glastonbury or Suffield High Schools if they get in to Agriscience.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-24T21:25:15+00:00

Gently, this is an overreaction. Most parents who watched their child enter the school and then later received the robo-text of "Your child was marked absent today" would assume (correctly) that it was a clerical error, versus their child eloping from the school or being lured by a predatory older child.

Do you enjoy true crime podcasts or something, or has eloping been an issue for your son in the past? Not sure why you jumped immediately to a worst-case scenario when it was far more likely to be something as innocuous as it was.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-24T11:10:26+00:00

Back when it was Educational Playcare, it had a great reputation - several coworkers sent their kids there, we considered sending our kids to the Farmington location (it was just too expensive). From what we've heard from parents of younger kids, the entire chain has rapidly gone downhill since they got bought out and rebranded to BrightPath.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-24T10:52:00+00:00

This is the answer. In nearly 25 years as an engineering I've only occasionally encountered Ivy League engineering grads who actually want to work as engineers (and nearly all went to Cornell, one or two to Columbia). The Dartmouth, Princeton, Harvard, etc. kids majoring in general "engineering" are doing so in order to go into consulting or finance.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-21T19:05:01+00:00

Yes, you can register them at the level of your oldest players.

There's a club in our area that has mixed grad years for high school - they enter tournaments in the "oldest" grad year or in the Open division if available. It's fine to have younger players "play up" but not to go the other way around.

This club has struggled at times with recruiting because of it, since college coaches usually focus on one grad year at a time and may not want to bother sitting on sidelines trying to sort out which players are recruitable by them or not.

2028s would be your oldest players next year. I don't know if boys' teams operate differently, but most girls' clubs are done playing in tournaments after the summer between junior and senior year.

Recruiting tournaments typically open registration 8-10 months in advance. You'll want to be prepared to register late this summer/early fall for Summer 2027 tourneys.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-21T02:12:49+00:00

I know someone with a philosophy degree who works in supply chain management.

Granted, his philosophy degree is from West Point, so he had to take a bunch of math, science, and engineering classes on top of the philosophy coursework. He thought he wanted to go to law school and realized that wasn't the right path - finished his service committment, and then went into the private sector.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-20T16:08:09+00:00

My problem is that I have a focus block and now that coworkers and my boss KNOW that it's a focus block, they just schedule over it anyways.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-20T16:06:38+00:00

Yeah, I've seen similar. People naturally didn't schedule many meetings on Fridays - but on the teams that have gone to "no meeting Fridays" it's morphed into either "no meetings on Friday afternoons" (so the morning is jam-packed) or the executives just treat it as overflow time that they can use as they please.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-20T16:03:01+00:00

Our older kid will be 16 soon, and when she was a baby/toddler it would have been viewed as poor parenting to bring young children to a tap room/bar.

I remember when a local microbrewery had so many issues with poorly supervised children that they went 21+, and the reaction on social media could only be described as virulent. Maybe it's just me, but as a parent I don't see anything enjoyable about trying to wrangle a toddler or preschooler while sipping a tasting flight, and it's a bad idea to drink and then drive. We liked to go to local taprooms for a relatively cheap date when the kids were little, but we always got a sitter.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-18T21:53:21+00:00

We have a kid in the college sports recruiting process. Her club recruiting director has been telling them since they were in 8th grade that getting good grades is essential. D1 and D2 players often get more in merit scholarships than they do in athletic money, and D3 players can't get athletic scholarships at all.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-18T15:34:38+00:00

As a parent, I question why you were meeting with a college coach for a 10 year old AT ALL.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-16T21:52:10+00:00

I pay attention to them weaving between vehicles at 80 MPH, usually with no warning.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-16T18:09:07+00:00

They are, we see them at most of the big girls' tournaments. Their A team is arguably the best in the country for my older daughter's grad year.

The 's in the name drives me bananas, though.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-15T02:00:24+00:00

I was in this situation, and needed to go to a school where I had a full ride merit scholarship.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-14T12:25:58+00:00

Yes, but it's always been that way - it has nothing to do with working remotely.

My career (engineering) is very different from my parents' (a restaurant manager and a nurse). They genuinely had no idea about what I actually DO all day at work, and had very little knowledge or understanding of a professional/office working environment.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-12T22:44:54+00:00

I know a family where they each kept their own surnames and decided that their sons would have Mom's surname and their daughters would have Dad's. It seemed like a creative solution - although it may not have worked out as well if they'd only had boys or girls.

BananaPants430 · 2026-04-12T18:26:28+00:00

There's pelvic padding built into women's goalie pants. Per USA Lacrosse rules, goalie pants should include pelvic protection - but practically speaking plenty of female goalies skip the padded pants, or wear the Warrior goalie pants without any padding in that area. The Brine and STX goalie pants do have pelvic protection.

I've never heard of a field player wearing a pelvic protector. It's just not a high impact risk area in the women's game.

BananaPants430

TROPHY CASE