I used to get 10-12 parents every season who weren’t ready to re-enroll for the following season right away. No matter how important I told them it was to spend their summers training for the upcoming season, they wanted a break. I had a hard time accepting that answer.
After all, if you take a break now, we won’t be as competitive as YOU wanted for next season.
It wasn’t until I became a parent and my kids got a little older that I started to understand where these parents were coming from.
Sometimes the athlete themself was just burned out. She needed a few weeks to BE A KID! She wanted to ride her bike at sunset (you know…that time when the sun goes down and it’s really beautiful? Remember that?) She wanted to go to her friend’s house after school and jump on a trampoline until dinnertime. She wanted to go to her brother’s baseball game (yes, I know…she tumbled every minute she was there and never even knew when he was up to bat.)
Your athletes need to be kids.
But, I also firmly believe to survive as a gym, we need to have consistent and predictable revenue. This means we need to find a way to keep tuition going 12 months per year and provide a valuable service to our gym families – one they WANT 12 months a year.
I went to a sports medicine conference hosted by our local hospital a few years ago. We’re a big sports community – mostly baseball, but the one thing I took away from there was that all athletes should have at least 6 weeks per year off of training to rest and restore their bodies. This came from really great doctors who treat sports injuries of all kinds.
Every coach in that room raised their eyebrows. We were all thinking the same thing, and then the doctor answered it.
“Yes, ideally you’d take all 6 weeks off at once, but we realize not all sports allow that. So, if you take them off in sections, make sure they get at least 2 weeks at a time totalling 6 weeks..”
Are you adding up in your head how long you allow off for Thanksgiving, Christmas break and Fourth of July? I did too. None of those were ever 2 weeks off.
So, we started reworking how we spent our summers at my gym. Summer was the most reasonable time for kids to take off, but 6 weeks at once would ensure we weren’t ready for choreography and would fall behind.
So, today, we have what we call “On” and “Off” weeks in the summer. We set up our summer so that we have 2 team practices per month. The other two weeks are completely optional. We educate parents that we want their kids to rest their bodies during the two weeks off, but we offer tumbling classes because not all kids need that rest period at the same time. (For example, my daughter takes two weeks at Christmas to visit her dad, so she doesn’t need to take all 6 weeks in the summer.)
During those two weeks off, which come out to be about half the month each month of the summer, we do team bonding events, volunteer hours or just let the kids stay home and have fun those nights.
Kids need to be kids, and this allows them to do that.
Are we ready for choreography at the end of July? Yep. We make detailed lesson plans throughout the summer and have better attendance during those on-weeks because parents make sure their kids will be there.
We educate them on the importance of their attendance those weeks, and they respect that.
So, after end-of-season events, we don’t take a lot of time off before tryouts. We keep going for a few weeks until tryouts are over. Then, we start our on and off weeks. Since we started that process, I’ve had less and less families take the summer off.
Whatever you choose to do, I recommend you look at how you can:
- Allow kids to be kids and enjoy their summer
- Help encourage families to take that rest and recovery time for their bodies
They won’t lose skills. In fact, you’ll be so impressed at how rested their bodies are (even if they go to the pool and ride their bikes!) that usually we see more new skills throughout the summer!
