Yukon Joe
Registered User
If the players are paying for it and handling all the logistics, sure. At that point, it’s their own time and their own money at stake.
Otherwise, it’s the parents’ time and money at stake. The parents are literally customers purchasing a service from the coaches. Giving them no voice in the decision is completely inappropriate and arguably disrespectful.
The pressures @Yukon Joe describes one post above are very real and seem to crush parents underfoot in this dynamic. I don’t know when low-level rec hockey coaches got this kind of social power, to tell people that their kids get to call the shots, but when the bills are in the five-figures annually it’s time to put that stuff out to pasture.
OK, so a couple more thoughts. I feel like I'm not taking a firm stance on these issues, but only because they're complicated.
So for a lot of coaches, they're not being paid - they're volunteers. They're just doing it because their kid is on the team and they love hockey. So I will ALWAYS try to defer to what the coach wants to do, because they were willing to put their time forward to be head coach, and I wasn't, I assistant coach which is a time commitment as well, but nothing like being the head coach. Last week on one kid's team, I was like "I wouldn't be spending our practice time on this", but I'm not the head coach, so I said nothing.
The issue I had with my other kid's team - to be fair they put it to a team vote of parents. My side lost. Fair enough. So we'll spend the extra money even though I really don't want to. But my feeling is that despite the fact that a quarter of the team was against this particular idea (because of the cost) the other parents seem hell-bent on just spending even more money, and not going "well OK we're going to do this thing, but since a bunch of parents thought it cost too much money lets try to cut costs elsewhere".