Managing your teen’s traveling sports team schedule can be a challenging task. Not only are you working to balance your son or daughter’s school schedule, traveling team practices and games, and any other extracurricular activities, but you also need to fit that into your family’s overall schedule, too. If you have a teen on a traveling team, then these tips can help you stay on top of all of the scheduling involved.
Find Out What’s Involved First
Before your teen signs up for a particular sports team, you need to get some detailed information on what’s involved. Ask for an outline of the type of travel that will be expected of the team members, including the length and frequency of travel, whether competitions occur on weekends, how late practices generally run on weeknights, and if there are any overnight trips required.
You’ll need to make sure that your teen can successfully handle the schedule. This article on the demands of travel sports teams for high schoolers has some great points to consider.
Outline Rules About Grades and Schoolwork
When your teen is ready to sign up for a team, you should take some time and outline some rules about what will happen if their grades drop or if their schoolwork slips. Decide on the consequences that they will face, and write these rules and consequences down to keep your son or daughter accountable.
Discuss Time Management Strategies
In order to successfully balance a traveling team schedule with the demands of school, your child will need to learn some great time management strategies. You can help your son or daughter by sharing time management strategies and tips with them, and by helping them to set up a schedule that outlines all of their commitments and responsibilities. This post has some excellent tips that you may want to share with your teen.
Keep a Centralized Family Calendar
In order to make sure that everyone in your family gets where they need to be, a centralized family calendar is essential. This becomes even more important with the practices and games that your teen’s traveling team will require, and knowing about these commitments ahead of time can give you more time to plan and adjust schedules if needed.
Google Calendar allows you to create individual calendars for each of your family members, which you can then view on one master calendar. You may even want to get your son or daughter involved in managing their own calendar that you can then view.
Take Advantage of GoKid and TeamSnap
One major challenge of traveling teams is that you may need to get your teen to practices and games in different locations and at varying times. GoKid can be a great solution to that challenge, though.
If you haven’t already downloaded GoKid, then now is the perfect time to do so. GoKid recently integrated with TeamSnap, so you can pull your child’s team rosters and event schedules right into GoKid. Then, you can create carpools with the families of other students on that same team. Whether you need to get your teen to practices, games, or other events, GoKid makes it easy to find other parents who can help split the driving and save you valuable time.
Team sports can be highly rewarding for kids and teens, and there’s no experience quite like being on a traveling team. With a little planning, you can ensure that your teen’s experience on a traveling team is a success both for them and for your entire family.
