Best 100 Bucks I Ever Spent

Years ago, two of my younger sons were on a local, private club swim team. When I took them to the registration night, there was a ton of paperwork to fill out: medical forms; liability waivers; basic contact info. There was also a form where you indicated what you wanted to do for your 20 hours of volunteer work for the club.

Options included:

     *Timing swimmers at the meets. So you’d be the one with the stopwatch, poolside, clicking when a swimmer completed a race, and reporting the time to the recordkeepers. What if you got distracted and missed that moment? It seemed like way too much pressure for a Saturday morning.

     *Keeping records of times. You would sit there at a table during the whole four to five hours of the meet, recording times that the timers told you. Lots of boxes on paper forms, flipping through pages to find the correct name to record a certain time. Again, a lot of room for error, and thus way too much pressure.

     *Set up. You would get to the particular swim meet venue an hour early to “set up.” Since the meets started at seven, that meant you would need to get up when it was dark out in order to make the commute. Blech.

     *Providing snacks and refreshments for the athletes. If I remember correctly (and that’s a big IF), you had to go to different locations and pick stuff up in your car, again super early on a weekend morning, and then you had to oversee the distribution of those refreshments. At that point in my life, I spent so much time feeding mouths, it was the last thing I wanted to volunteer to do more of.

There were other volunteer “jobs,” but I don’t remember them all. I do remember reading the description of each one and thinking, variously, “Uh-uh.” “Over my dead body.” “No way in hell.”

I spotted an option at the very bottom of the Volunteer Commitment page. It looked like you could opt out of all that shit by paying $100 more to the club. To be sure I was understanding correctly, I asked the woman who was coordinating the paperwork about it. “Yes, that’s how it works. You check that box and write out another check to the club for $100.” She smiled and leaned in. “Nobody ever does that, though.”

Well. I did. Best 100 smackers I ever spent.

I acknowledge and respect the volunteer hours that parents in that organization donated to the club. At the time, I didn’t believe I had the bandwidth, and opting out felt like self-care. I also acknowledge that, if everyone took the $100 opt-out, the club would need to imagine and develop other ways for those volunteer jobs to happen; or perhaps, imagine and develop a different kind of organization where all that parent volunteer work isn’t necessary.

The next year, at the registration night, I noticed that the volunteer opt-out had doubled to $200. I guess some policy makers in the club felt that $100 was too deep a bargain to buy out of those hours.

That second opt-out was the Best 200 Bucks I Ever Spent.