I recently interviewed my school’s athletic director, Mr. Friedman, to get information on transportation and what goes down when teams have to play away games.
Me: What are the biggest struggles when it comes to transportation?
Mr. Friedman: I think the biggest struggle is that we have a lot of teams that go lots of different places, so staying on top of changing schedules and making sure we can get all teams where they need to be safely and on time.
Me: What is the ideal transportation?
Mr. Friedman: Obviously, in a perfect world. if we had our own fleet of buses because we rely on a company called AA Transportation to help us with our athletic transportation. The school system has purchased one bus and we have a couple smaller mini-van type transports that some of our teams utilize but on busy days we have to rely on an outside company to help with busing, and sometimes that’s challenging and always expensive.
Me: What strategies do you use for ensuring reliable transportation?
Mr. Friedman: So I meet with the school districts transportation director, Mrs. Whitford, on a regular basis. I meet with her once a week to go over all our athletic schedules for the upcoming week and I talk to her every day to double check that our buses and our teams are all scheduled.
Me: Has anything bad happened and how can we fix it?
Mr. Friedman: Fortunately nothing I would call “bad” has happened. At times our buses have been late to pick up a team and take them to a game or been late to pick a team up from another school. Fortunately it has only been a couple minutes here and there and we have been able to fix the situation. It’s just about being organized and understanding where our teams are going and whose driving them and what teams have to be where.
After the interview, I realized that good transportation pretty much is that the buses should be on time, they should stay for the games, and they should provide a good climate for riders to endure. If they can’t be on time then there should be a way to get reimbursed or find another method of transportation. Having the buses stay for the games will ensure being on time and everyone getting safely where they need to be.
