Kent Brockman: What started out as a traditional soccer riot has quickly escalated into a city-wide orgy of destruction. Reacting swiftly, Mayor Quimby declared "mob rule", meaning for the next several years, it's every family for themselves...
--The Simpsons, "The Cartridge Family" (11/2/97)
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So the good news is, that even though Wee One's cheerleading team came in fourth at Ocean City, they've still been invited to the Nationals at Virginia Beach. Yay!
The bad news is that the team is going to have to raise some money to get there. Now, the older team had been invited already; we knew that and we also knew that money was going to have to be raised for them as well. So last week, GF sat down with the Rec Director and let her know that she and I have experience with fundraisers. Those of you who have been with this bit of electronic detritus have read stories about it in the past. 
On those two events we raised quite a bit of money. The Rec Director thought this was a great idea and GF and I started working on the plans: locating a date, finding a location and digging up all the old contacts and documents that we used the previous times. It's not our squad specifically, but we're going to do our part for the Parkville Patriots, right?
On Tuesday we got word that Wee One's squad had also been invited to the Nationals. We're not clear on why this is the case, but who's complaining? We also heard that there was a mandatory parents meeting going on today while the girls were in practice. I was going to be out of town, but GF could be there and put forth the presentation on the pancake thing. (We'd decided on pancakes because there are way too many dinners going on in the area, including the local VFW, which seems to have a spaghetti dinner every month, and because the overhead is pretty low, which means more money going directly to the team.)
When she got to the meeting, however, it was a different story. From what I can piece together, another parent had already taken it upon himself to set up a Bull & Shrimp dinner at some place (I'm still not clear where) on Eastern Avenue. Tickets for this thing will be $40 each, three-fourths of which would go to the guy supplying the food. The team would get $10 per ticket sold. And--AND--this parent guaranteed the supplier a minimum of one hundred participants. So before this was even presented to the other parents, the team was three thousand dollars in the hole, for an event that's about one month away and competing with a dozen other similar events in the area.
Also, because of the timing of the event (nighttime) and the fact that we're talking about serving beer at this thing, this means that the girls themselves won't be able to participate to any great extent, thus marginalizing their buy-in to the process.
This wasn't the only bone of contention, GF told me. There was also some discussion as to whether the older team--which placed better than Wee One's team, remember--is actually ready for something like going to Virginia Beach, that perhaps they hadn't really given it their all and who knew if these girls were ready and willing to put in the work involved? Apparently a lot of this discussion had already taken place among several of the parents. VIA FACEBOOK.
I asked GF if anyone considered just going into the room next door where the girls were practicing and, oh I don't know, asking them--and she said that someone did, indeed, finally do that. The girls were completely psyched about going.
The other thing that gets to me about this whole mess is that this was supposed to be a mandatory meeting about the Nationals competition, and GF told me that no more than four or five girls from each squad were represented. She said that there were no more than twenty grownups in that room total, and several of them were couples, which meant that some kids were represented by two adults and others by none at all. Usually the decisions are made by the people who show up, but this time the agenda was completely hijacked and has spun way out of control. They're also talking about a silent auction, a raffle, one of those wheel of fortune gizmos, and I don't know what-all else.
I wasn't going to do this, but what the hell. Let's do a cost comparison:
On a shrimp and bull roast, we have to spend thirty dollars per person. Someone else supplies all the food and drink, and the adults do absolutely everything, because the girls can't do much more than get underfoot. At $40 a ticket, that's 33% profit, which isn't bad.
On a pancake breakfast, and assuming that nothing gets donated (and GF and I are pretty good at getting businesses to donate goods), we can buy ten pounds of pancake mix for six bucks. 36 sausage patties is another eight dollars. A gallon of syrup is less than six dollars. Orange juice is about three dollars a gallon. We've invested an hour in shopping, we haven't spent thirty dollars YET and we've fed at least eighteen people. What the hell: throw in a few dozen eggs and some coffee and make it an even thirty. The girls themselves will be able to participate in the serving and some of the cleanup, which gives them some personal investment in the project. And now at the conservative price of seven dollars each, I see that we've netted almost $100. By my math, that's a 320% return on the original investment. Plus, I think it's a hell of a lot easier to sell a stack of $7 tickets than it is a stack of $40 ones. In fact, when we did the Morrell Park fundraiser (the first one), several people bought tickets and never even showed up. That was entirely profit on our part. That's not likely to happen with the bull roast.
Will they make money? Yeah, they probably will. But there's so much overhead, and so much that needs to be overcome, that the money made will not be worth the level of effort that will have to go into it, especially given the rather small relative profit to be made.
Decisions are usually made by the people who show up. But this was little more than a hijacking, and in my eyes, letting it take place is a huge mistake. You saw it here first.
