Saturday Is Better

When I initially floated the idea to some of the parents about moving sparring from Friday to Saturday, I was met with approval.  The parents wanted to watch their kids spar, but admitted that it was not easy to arrange their schedules to be in the boxing gym on a weekday.  Based on that information, when I change the sparring day around, that will be a permanent schedule change instead of just making that for summer only.

Sparring used to be on Saturdays when I first started working for the park district.  The intent was to have it on a day when school and perhaps other activities were not a factor.  But then most youths, and the adult participants as well, were not showing up on Saturdays.  I switched sparring back to weekdays thinking it was easier to draw people into the gym, especially youths coming out of school for the day.

Now I realize that I've been accommodating and compromising with people for way too long.  The boxing gym hours are what they are.  I should have never been doing constant adjustments in a futile attempt to work with every one's personal schedules.  Either youths and adults deal with the days, times, and training schedule of the boxing program or they don't.

In addition to Saturday being an easier day for busy parents to come in and see their kids' progress, it works better with the park district's boxing show schedule.  The City-Wide Boxing Tournament, as well as the weekly boxing shows that take place between June and February take place on weekdays. If someone had a hard fight on a Thursday, the day weekly boxing shows currently take place, it wouldn't do to have them sparring back at the gym on a Friday.  This is especially true if fighters were injured.  I could let them skip the gym on Friday to rest and give them the option of sparring on Saturday, if they felt up to it.  They could also skip Saturday, depending on what happened at a Thursday fight and start again the following week.

Everyone would have four solid days of training, instead of having that broken up by sparring on Friday, and then returning on Saturday for a regular training day.  I could further keep track of who is just showing up to spar, cutting down on some participants' willingness to fight but not train.

No matter what I do in terms of scheduling, however, there is always going to be some who aren't going to attend the class regularly, and those who will show up but won't train.  I don't doubt that there will be people -- the youths, mostly -- who will complain about the change of sparring day.  But running that program efficiently is more important to me.