I am sharing this with everyone so that our freshmen students and parents know this isn't the first time we have had problems on a trip with young students and won't be the last. I have no doubt this posting will bring some smiles to our older students and parents having gone through many of the same experiences. But I am hoping we all learn from the experiences:
Novices tend to not fully listen to what is said and as a result miss a few things along the way which would help them out. This weekend we had two students make the trip with no or little food money. We got that handled but each student needs some cash to eat. We had a student lose a retainer at Kentucky Fried Chicken. A coach dug through 80 gallons of KFC trash and chicken bones trying to find it with a KFC employee. Not fun.
We had a student misplace an important bracelet at the hotel. A coach had to leave the tournament and drive back to the hotel in an effort to find it.
We had a student throw (literally) all of his cloths in his bag and thrown the bag in the suburban to come home only to pull them out of the suburban and have his clothes land in the parking lot. Got to pack correctly! There are zippers on those bags!
We had a couple of rooms nearly "oversleep" our seven am departure from the hotel, etc. Checking to be sure you have everything out of the suburbans is another important items. That saves coaches from lugging things into the building that belong to students. I have several items left over from this trip.
If a student has special dietary needs (vegitarian or relgious) coaches need to know those things in advance! That way we can better plan where we are eating. And sometimes, we don't get options to accomodate the variety of special needs we have in the program. So always packing some items like power bars is a good idea.
Girls in particular don't want to eat at lesser expensive fast food places. They are sensative about health and weight issues. But students MUST eat when we travel. Coaches go nuts when kids don't eat because we have seen the problems when they don't: blood sugars drop and behavior and competative issues arise. Further, debate is no different than sports--kids need fuel to keep their brains sharp.
And what they eat before we leave is as important as what they eat on the trip. A few years ago I had the freshmen sit down with me and list everything they ate the two days proceeding a trip. Things like hot dogs sans buns for breakfast went on the board. If you eat correctly before competing, you will likely perform better. It is that simple.
Parents also need to realize that students arrive home from these trips mentally exhausted. This is serious competition. My son would come home from debate trips just as exhausted as he did from Varsity football games.
One the positive side of things--it was impressive that no Roosevelt novice got lost on the UNI campus! And, to my knowledge, we had no hotel room issues, like making a lot a noise, etc.
Of course, we weren't the only school to have some novice travel issues. One school had a student horsing around and give a light shove to a girl at the top of some stairs. She fell, severely turning an ankle, had a trip to the hospital because she had just gotten that ankle out of a cast.
Novices need to listen to the captains and older students a bit more. That would save them some problems as well. Learning how to travel is part of the experience! I thought our more experienced travels on the trip did a great job of providing the right advise to younger students. But, of course, not every novice wants to hear advise from older students.
Overall it was a good first travel experience for this group of students. We have more novices yet to travel. Parents, please take a moment and talk with your student before leaving on trips and make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to travel. We want our kids to have the best experiences possible!
