Guidelines for Parents

[GeeTwo]

Adult team members* who are family members of student team members or former team members are essential for our team, and probably most others. Other than our rookie year, at least 50% of our adult team members, and more than 50% of the highly active adult team members have been family of student members or former student members.

I agree that parent/family interaction (whether a coach/mentor or not) is something you have to have a policy on. To date, our policy has been simple, established by example by our founding head coach (whose son was on the team in 2012-2014). I have generalized it just a bit to account for a mentor who has a brother on the team:

Originally Posted by Jesse's Hithertofore Unwritten Rule

An adult family member of a student team member shall not advocate with respect to a team position for that student member. To the extent possible, an adult family member shall not directly mentor a student family member.

The rule is not perfect, but some form of it shall go in our team manual being drafted this summer. We've only had two issues in our five years that took anything more than a one-on-one conversation or two to resolve. In one case, the second sentence wasn't possible, and the student was (initially) treated too poorly. The other was because it was unwritten and poorly enforceable. Our written rule will at least attempt to patch these gaps.

*An adult team member is either a a coach or mentor; an adult family member may or may not be a coach or mentor.