Director's Corner

I’ve caught myself, over the past few years, sounding more and more like a grumpy old man. If you haven’t heard me, then you’ve probably heard someone else bemoan the youth of today. You may have even been guilty of it yourself, talking about their lack of work ethic and desire that we all had (at least as we remember it) when we were in our teens and early twenties.

Let me restore some of your faith, just as mine is restored every summer. In Recreation & Parks, we hire 10-15 part-time workers in the summer, most of them high school students, with a few college students thrown in. Some of the older ones have been with us for several years now. And every year, they restore my faith in future generations.

These young men work hard in the spring and summer months, and without them, many of our programs wouldn’t enjoy the success that we achieve. They’ve been the load-in crew for our events, and for everyone else from the sound and lighting technicians at Balloon Glow to Aaron Tippin’s band. They work on baseball, softball, and soccer fields; pick up trash; clean restrooms; set up tables, tents, chairs, stages, scaffolding, and various other apparatus for special events; plant flowers and mulch flower beds; mow, edge, and trim grass all over the park system; plant trees; keep water and ice in dugouts and coolers during tournaments and special events; and do various other chores to make our programs and events successful. Many of them, after they’ve matured and we’ve developed some trust in them, are given the opportunity to operate some of the more complex machinery that our maintenance staff uses in its day-to-day operations.

They are often called on to perform maintenance tasks and administrative tasks that even the most grizzled veteran wouldn’t want to perform, including asking adults many years older than they to conform to park rules. They have, at times, been ignored and/or ridiculed by adults who were supposed to know better. In every case thus far, they have conducted themselves in the most professional manner, often times acting much more mature than the people they are dealing with.

They are still young, and they’re certainly not perfect. They have to be reminded, from time to time, that the golf carts are for use in transporting equipment, personnel, and trash from one location to the other, not for racing along the walking trail. When we have softball tournaments with young ladies of various ages at the park, they sometimes have to be reminded that they are being paid to work, not for taking part in some kind of dating game. They occasionally want to sit too much when I think they should be moving around at least looking as though they were working.

However, when the pressure’s on, when the rains have come and ball fields need to be dried out so we can resume play, or when we only have five minutes to get a ball field ready before the next game, they are always ready and able to perform. They take pride in their jobs, and that makes me proud of them. I can’t take the credit; that goes to our full-time maintenance employees and to those youngsters who have been around for a while and have passed down the tradition. I think they also like the fact that visitors to our facilities notice their hard work and appreciate the results of it.

I do know this: sometimes it takes me half the summer to learn all of their names and to match them with the faces, but I think of all of them as my own, and I’m proud that we have them to make all of our programs better. More than that, I’m proud that maybe, as they help us, we prepare them for a future in whatever they undertake. And, if the young men that work for us are any indication, the youth of today are going to be all right.

– Chris Chance