I really hope it's a joke.

I spent my whole weekend in Knoxville, shepherding a group of high school girls at the TN High School Swimming and Diving Championships. My girls are generally not a problem, and I've never before come away from a state meet totally frustrated, but this was different.

First, the meet has been in Nashville ever since I started coaching high school. Add an extra three hours to the drive both ways and a time change, and you've got a recipe for tiredness. We had to stay an extra day, because of the length of the drive, so I had to put up with the girls for longer than I have before.

Then we add in the "in town" driving factor. In Nashville, we always stay right by the pool, so we can walk back and forth between the pool and the hotel. There are plenty of restaurants of varying styles and price ranges in the area, so we never have to drive anywhere at all. In Knoxville our hotel was on the opposite side of UT's campus from the sports center, so we couldn't walk to the pool without walking 1.5 miles across very busy streets lugging swim bags. It meant loading the girls up every time we had to go anywhere. Parking was a pain, both on campus for the meet and off campus at restaurants, so we spent a lot of time either dropping off the girls and then looking for a parking space, or wrangling my SUV into very small spaces.

The unfamiliarity with the area was a problem as well. We didn't know what restaurants were available, so it was much harder for the girls to make a decision about where they wanted to eat. They would change their minds several times before finally setting on what was usually the least convenient option.

Thankfully I did have several parents who were helping transport the girls; otherwise I would have had to do a lot of shuttling back and forth.

But probably most frustrating aspect of the trip was the involvement of other teams in our plans. You see, the swimming community in Memphis is very small. There aren't many pools available to host high school teams' practices during the swim season. The major pools already have year-round swimming programs that practice during the times of day that would be the best for everyone else, namely the hours right after school. These year-round programs are nice enough to allow the high school teams to utilize some of their pool space, but it benefits the year-round programs--we must pay them per swimmer, and the high school swimmers must actually JOIN the year-round team for the duration of the season. The times available for the high school swimmers to practice are much less convenient (for example, 7:00-8:30 at night), and many of the swimmers get so tired of the late nights that they join the year-round teams full-time so they can practice earlier in the day, which gets more money to the year-round teams.

The kids all know each other from the year-round swimming programs, so they are competing against teammates during the high school season. When we go to a big meet like the state championships, they wander around the meet looking for the year-round teammates rather than staying with their high school teams. Some of the girls have boyfriends who swim for other schools, so I have to go hunting for the boys' schools when it comes time to get in the water, because my girls are missing. They want to get all their friends on other high school teams together to go do things, like eat or watch movies, rather than stay with their own teammates for the whole weekend. And the year-round coaches don't help--they come to the meets, expect their swimmers to practice and warm-up as a year-round team, and encourage the kids to get together as a year-round team rather than as high school teams. It's incredibly distressing, but there's very little I can do about it. If I complain about too much year-round influence, I stand the possibility of losing my pool space to practice in.

I feel like I've been reduced to the job of chaperone rather than coach. If the year-round coaches want to have so much influence during the high school season, I think THEY should be the ones to go to all the meets, handle all the entries, and chaperone the trip. I did quite a bit to make the girls' trip run smoothly, but when they planned a "fun night" with their year-round buddies, no one told me about it, certainly no one asked me, and they clearly expected me to drive them where they wanted to go (it ended up falling through, but it irked me completely that they would have the nerve to expect such treatment).

I've had run-ins with year-round coaches before, but never has their influence so broadly affected my trip as this year. And the girls' behavior in running around with their friends and acting like divas (one was "dramatically" sick while she had to swim but perked right up when she didn't have to later that evening, and one supposedly dislocated her shoulder while warming down after a race, almost like she needed attention for something) should have been somewhat expected since it's a young state team (two seniors, one sophomore, four freshmen) but was really bothersome and seemed to drag the older girls into it as well.

While I was proud of how the girls swam, I spent the whole weekend really irritated and really tired. This is the first state meet since I started coaching high school (ninth season) that I didn't really have fun. It makes me question how much longer I want to coach a sport.

And then we get to the joke part of this rather long post. Now that the season is over, I sent an e-mail to our AD, asking about getting our stipend for the season. His e-mail response was, "I told the administration that you and [your assistant coach] would forgo your stipend this season."

No "JK!" or "LOL" or anything to indicate he might be kidding. He IS a kidder, somewhat, but usually there is something there to suggest it. I sent him my own "kidding" e-mail, with " :( *sniff* ", hoping to trigger a "No really, here's when you can expect to get paid", but I got nothing at all in return.

He'd better be joking. I give up nights and weekends for this sport, and I live 45 minutes from town which means a really long drive home, often late at night, after meets. I'd BETTER be getting paid for this. If not, it will easily answer my question about how long I want to keep coaching.