[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published March 30, 2026] ©2026
As much as I whine and complain about technology, I have to confess that I am almost berserkly envious of how much easier it has made managing youth sports teams and organizations.
As a divorced working mom, I was always looking for activities to do with my sons since they weren’t all that interested in lunch and shopping never mind getting mani/pedis. Go figure. Given my work schedule, I wasn’t able to do any volunteer activities during the school day but did manage to put in plenty of hours running Pack 4 Cub Scouts, and managing soccer and basketball teams.
Back in the Paleolithic era of youth activities management, our only sources of communication were phone trees, Thomas Bros maps, and the U.S. Postal service. I’m hard put to decide which of three was the least reliable.
To those who don’t even know what a phone tree was (and lucky you), it can be defined as “an archaic and fundamentally unreliable method of disseminating critical information by purported telephonic communication usually resulting in confusion, blame trading, and players at the wrong field.”
The way it worked was that the team manager (that would be moi) would call three designated people who would then call their three other designated people. If all went well, the three people I called would have contacted nine more people.
To say that this rarely worked would be an understatement. I was often leaving the message on an answering machine without ever knowing if the person got it, or acted on it. Those poor folks at the bottom of that tree often ended up with communication root rot.
You remember that old game of “telephone”? The one where people whispered something in the ear of the person next to them, etc. By the time it got to the last person, the message was usually unrecognizable from its origins. And that, of course, was often the outcome of phone trees. The recipient of the message had to pass it on accurately which happened pretty much never.
If there was a sudden cancellation or change of field for a game, it was a rare day that everybody got it. And it goes without saying that they blamed the team manager.
Getting instructions to game fields was another hurdle. I always had the most recent Thomas Bros map book, which for those no more familiar with it than they are with phone trees, was the gold standard of location services. An early but almost instantly outdated GPS, if you will. The problem was that our games were often in North County, an area growing so fast at the time that if you only had last years’ Thomas Bros map book, the field wasn’t even there. So saying, “See Thomas Bros page B-65” wasn’t going to help if that page showed a large unincorporated area with a lake and no streets – or field.
Don’t even get me going on the Snack Mom schedule. Even if I made assignments at the start of the season and passed out a printed schedule, people forgot, or lost the schedule, or were out of town, or traded dates with someone who then forgot. Personally, I think those kids would have survived just fine without orange slices at half time and juice boxes and cookies after the game. But that’s just me. The debate over how healthy the after-game snacks should be was never ending.
This all got yet more complicated for tournaments, especially County Cup, and exponentially more complicated for State Cup, which was invariably in Bakersfield even though there were teams in our bracket playing right up the street at Allen Field. Please note that Bakersfield is at minimum a five-hour drive from here and requires going through L.A. I like to think that cuisine has improved up there over the years but I still remember Bakersfield as having the second worst food I have ever eaten. (The worst was at my nephew’s Basic Training graduation in Lawton, Oklahoma. No matter what you ordered, it had chicken gravy on it. The stuff labeled “heart healthy” just had less chicken gravy.)
Wringing coaching and tournament fees out of player’s parents – checks that I had to deposit at the bank in the teams’ account - was part-time job all on its own, never mind booking hotels. At the time, Bakersfield’s hotel selections were confined to Abysmal and Really Abysmal. I’m told they’ve improved.
We did plenty of out-of-town tournaments besides State Cup that also required accommodations. Some parents wanted more upscale hotels while others wanted the cheapest motel in the area. But we all needed to stay in the same place.
I fortunately had access to a photocopier at work (thank you, National Science Foundation!) so I could print off copies of maps and memos, snack Mom assignments, and schedules to hand out at games. But if a player was not at a game, they didn’t get one.
Sometimes it all got a little much. In doing some really really overdue file cleaning, I came across a folder from one of Henry’s soccer teams that I managed that contained a transcript of a recording I put on my phone. It read:
Hi, this is Inga.
If you are calling to say your son can’t come to County Cup because you will be in Maui, press one now.
If you are calling to complain about State Cup accommodations, press two now.
If you are calling to question March-April coaching fees, press three.
If you can’t find your copy of the Snack Mom schedule but think it might be your week, please press four.
If you are calling to say you can’t host the end of season team party after all, press 5.
If you are calling to ask if we can change the spring soccer practice schedule due to baseball conflicts, do not leave a message because you’re the people who insisted your kid could do both.
If you know where I can get a prescription for Prozac, PLEASE, stay on the line.
(And yes, this was an actual recording that lived on my answering machine for some weeks.)
Interestingly, a lot of people called to listen to that message who weren’t even on our team. I’d come home from work and see I had 32 calls. Most people didn’t even leave a message. Or they’d say, “A friend told me to call this number. Love it.” I think there were a lot of other frustrated youth sports managers out there.
The mere thought that one could manage all of this with MapQuest, group emails, and Zelle accounts is a world I could never have even envisioned. Had I been able to, I would have foregone being a team manager and made the kids go for lunch and mani-pedis.
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