[GeeTwo]

One of the things we've done that seems to help keep rookie retention is to increase the number of hours that we meet during autumn. Now that we meet two evenings during the week and alternate Saturdays from tryouts until Christmas break, we lose far fewer during the build season when we meet three evenings and every Saturday.

We have had trouble keeping seniors in recent years. Of our five juniors in 2016, I expect that we'll only have one or two -- losing our three three-year veterans (including my own son and daughter) for 2017. Many of these losses are due to desire to participate in the Senior Play (a dramatic presentation), a few are to job opportunities, and a few are to simple burnout. The intensity of the junior research project and senior research project at Slidell High certainly does not help. In our case, we may have to make some changes to let our veterans continue to contribute to the near-peer mentoring at a lesser time commitment in order to keep them at all.