Nathan’s first game as a Blue Dragon was yesterday:
I think he enjoyed himself, but he’s a little confused about some of the rules, like switching goals at halftime. We’ll play a bit in the backyard this week.
I wanted to do something for April Fool’s Day on my blog. But I had an idea during Nathan’s game yesterday that I ultimately rejected as potentially too trouble-causing, and unfortunately I’ve been brain-locked on it and can’t sufficiently release it to think of anything else. I hate when that happens.
Nathan’s practices and games are at Palmer Park, a complex of 150 acres or so on the west side of the city. It’s a nice park surrounded by mature trees, with multiple soccer fields, baseball fields, batting cages, and football fields. There can be a couple of thousand people through the place on a busy Saturday; when games and practices aren’t going on, it’s a great place to fly a kite, geocache, or just take a walk.
So I thought it would be hilarious to work up a fake press release, faxed and emailed to the four winds, about the city selling the park to a developer for an exclusive gated community: “These gently rolling hills are perfect for condominiums and brick ranchers, and with the roads already in place, it was a no-brainer.” To answer objections about the loss of the recreation facility, I’d have him saying “well, we’re buying some adjacent property too, and we’re thinking about a golf course. That’s recreation.”
Then the developer would go on about “Phase II,” which would include shops, a monorail, a hotel, convention space, etc. (and for non-locals, know that we need another Peoplequarium of carefully-crafted corporate whimsy around here like we need a smallpox outbreak). I was going to keep it absolutely serious-sounding, with only the subtlest of indications that it wasn’t legitimate (casually mention plans for a polo field or something). The only “this is a joke” communication would have come at the end of the day, to all of the same places I faxed and emailed at the beginning of the day.
(There’s a commercial development deannexation controversy going on right now, too, so people are already primed to be pissed off about property issues. This probably would have flown.)
Alas, it might have caused a lot of problems for some good friends in local government. Also, the risk of long-term alienation at the start of my illustrious local sports parent career seemed too great. So here I am telling you about it instead of sitting back and watching the chaos ensue.
Discretion? Yeah, I got that. Damned inconvenient sometimes, but there it is.
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We play BASEBALL in the same park, as GOD intended. I was out there yesterday afternoon. If I had known, I’d have dropped by to educate your kid on THE nation’s pasttime.
If you want to see a bunch of uptight hysterical moms and dads, put that flyer on the cars out there.
Nathan didn’t want to play baseball. I asked. It’s a good thing, though, since when I checked into it, I was already “late” to sign up and it would have cost us an extra $25 on top of the $92 fee.
Can someone please explain the need to sign your kid up for a sport 3 to 6 months in advance? Especially, if the organizations wait until the last minute to contact you? Plus, it’s like trying to join a secret society figuring out when and where you need to sign up in the first place.
Ha ha – yes. I will be driving around and see a banner outside of Applebees – time to sign up. DOH! I guess a season of spring soccer won’t hurt the little guy.
For baseball, they have to make sure they know how many people to coerce into being coaches. That is one reason for signup so early. Last year, our age group had 27 teams. With 2 coaches per team, that’s a lot of talkin’ into. Next January check madisonbaseball.org for signup times.
If I had been one of the recipients of your little prank I would’ve gone ballistic! Nothing pisses me off more than condominium developments.