It’s a great day to be a DILLO! The registration numbers are in, and it looks like 87% of our students will be returning to face-to-face instruction. We respect the choices of all our parents. There has been so much concern and uncertainty, but I want to focus on what has not changed and what is true. Our teachers are excited about doing what they do best, teach kids, unchanged truth. They will be here to teach kids, unchanged truth. Life is unpredictable, unchanged truth. We are taking the necessary protocols to protect our students and staff, but the coronavirus is a tricky adversary. There are a lot of unknowns. There are no guarantees for anyone that will keep us from sickness, but we will do the best we can, unchanged truth.
On another matter, many of you have asked about football tickets and the 50% stadium capacities. We feel we can accommodate most of our fans for home games, but away games are a different story.
To help soften the blow of what limited seating for away games will be like, I will share this story. It was Easter and we had gone to my grandparents in Pleasanton, Texas, to celebrate with them. I was eight or nine, and a large community Easter egg hunt was always part of the fun. That year, the town was changing up the traditional egg hunt with a candy egg drop from a helicopter. In the past, they did not feel the community egg hunt was fair because some kids were better egg hunters than others, and some kids did not get any eggs at all. The solution was to level the playing field for all the kids. All the kids were lined up, baskets in hand like the Oklahoma land rush at the edge of a big field. The helicopter came in low and scattered the eggs like a crop duster all over the field. Surely every kid would have the opportunity to find at least one egg. A whistle was blown, and the kids were turned loose. The kid with the most eggs in their basket would win a special prize. You can imagine the fiasco. Kids who fell early in the dash were almost trampled by a stampede of sugar deprived youngsters. It was pretty much guaranteed that the meanest kid at the hunt was going to win that prize. This was no contest for the timid. It was the bloodiest Easter egg hunt in the town’s history. There has never been one like it before or since. It was every kid for themselves, and I am sure that some kids needed therapy after the event. Other than my birth announcement, I think that was the first time I ever had my picture in the paper for winning first prize. You might say my first taste of victory was sweet. To calm your fears, we are not doing a ticket drop or a calf scramble, goat tie or wrestle off for away game tickets. We will come up with a solution that is as fair as we can make it, but not everyone will be happy.
The guidelines for home games are printed in this addition of the paper and on social media. To be clear, we are selling tickets for home games, and people will have the opportunity to purchase season tickets for varsity home games only. JV and Junior High games will be business as usual with tickets sold at the gate. Our capacities for JV and JH games are not an issue with our stadium capacities. Away games are still a problem we are trying to solve. We are waiting for a few schools to give us their visitor stadium capacities including band, cheerleaders, and drill teams. Here are some of the conundrums we face. Our student participants number is about 120. If we gave every student 2 tickets that equals 240 tickets. Some stadiums will only seat 200 fans at 50% capacity. Some stadium capacities are much higher, but there will be a few away games that will be very limiting. By only doing pre-sale tickets, we avoid having a family drive 2 ½ hours only to be denied admission to the game.
We will have some difficult decisions to make, and we are exploring several possibilities. Sometimes no matter how hard we try to level the playing field and make it fair for all involved, people still end up disappointed.
Life is not always fair, unchanged truth. Hang in there and GO DILLOS!