10/15/2022 - Its time to PLAN

This blog will piggyback off my previous blog post, Excel is your Friend! The first step to a successful season is budget, which I discussed in the previous post, next is planning and scheduling.

Number one rule, DONT TAKE ON MORE THAN YOU ( or your dancer) CAN HANDLE! I can not stress this enough! There is nothing worse than letting your dancer take on too many dances or agree to go to too many competitions, and then realizing you can't manage it (for whatever reason) than having to break it to your kid, and the team. No one wins in that situation.

One thing I do is look at what we did in the previous seasons and assess from there. I ask myself the following questions:

Was this season doable?

Was it too financially difficult?

Did we have time commitment issues (I have two kids both in two different competitive Athletic sports)?

Was my dancer overwhelmed?

Was she performing to the best of her ability?

I also like to look at how her schedule affected other aspects of her life and how she handled it as well as our family life (and my sanity) as a whole.

Balancing the family life split between both of my kids is something I personally struggle with. I want to provide them both with my full attention, but that's physically not possible. It's impossible for me to be at two places at once. There are not enough hours in the day for me to get everything I need to do done AND go to both my kid's activities. I work a full-time job, am in the last semester of my Masters's degree, and help out at my daughter's studio 3 nights a week and do all their costumes. Trying to add my son's competitive gymnastics in there is very difficult. One thing I try to do is make sure I make everyone's competitions. This will be my son's first year traveling for gymnastics competitions and it is going to be a struggle. I am going to miss one or two due to already being out of town for competitions but there will be times when I am at my daughters' competition and will drive an hour or two to make his meets, then back to where her comps are. We do what we gotta do, right?! This is where "Divide and Confqureing" comes in. My husband tries to manage our sons' activities as much as possible while I handle our daughters. My daughter tends to stay busier than my son. He likes his downtime. I digress. We will talk more about dividing and conquering in an upcoming post. Back to scheduling!

During the 2021-2022 season, my daughter was unimaginably busy. She was on the dance team at school, the studio competition dance team, creators in motion model, an apprentice with PNT, and in the conservatories production of The Nutcracker. Not to mention we switched studios after our season already started (long story, but for the best). Yea, it was crazy.

I swear we were traveling every weekend. It was expensive, exhausting, fun, crazy, and took a LOT of planning and juggling between myself, my husband, and my mom (we are the dream team).

When we went into planning mode for the current season, my daughter decided she was over the school dance team and wanted to step away from that. She didn't gain much from it and didn't enjoy it as much as she had hoped. She felt it got in the way of her Studio dance, which is where her passion is 100%. She also didn't audition for the Nutcracker again. It was a very neat experience for her and she got to say she was in the production of the Nutcracker, but again, not something she wanted to revisit this year. Maybe in later years, she may want to audition again.

This year she decided to focus on Studio dance. She is still doing the Creators in Motion Modeling team and absolutely loves it, but that schedule is pretty flexible and not demanding. She is also continuing with the apprentice program with PNT, however, that is kind of in the same realm as the studio dance world. So now that we have our activities paired down to what she will be doing this year, it's time to set out the studio schedule and accept what dances she will be in.

Last year she started out the season at her old studio in 5 group dances and 2 solos (not counting the three dances for the dance team at school). This was probably one of the lower amounts she was used to doing and a drastic drop from the year before. After she left that studio and moved to her new studio, she was put into 7 group dances and learned two new solos, and then by the time nationals came, she was added to two of the Sr groups. She really grew as a person and a dancer at her new studio. She THRIVED and was happy! That being said, it was totally manageable for us financially. It took a lot of planning and budgeting but we did it.

This year she has taken a very large jump and is in 13 group dances, 3 solos, and a duet. So far she is doing well and loving it. It is a little more on us financially, but we think we can make it happen. Well not think, we WILL make it happen because we have made the commitment. Not only has SHE made the commitment to her dance team, but we as a family have made the commitment to the studio. It's so hard on the studio, coaches, and fellow dancers when people have to drop or change things around. If it ends up being too much for Dad and I, then we will have to take a step back NEXT year, but we will access it then. If we have done our due diligence and planned well, we should be golden! :)

Another aspect that we look at, besides just the competition fees for the NUMBER of dances she will be in are the fees associated with costuming, choreography, and hotels. Our studio brings in fantastic choreographers from all over the United States, and choreography fees are NOT cheap, but totally worth it. We have to make sure we can afford the choreography fees, so I always over budget for these.

Our studio also does custom costuming, which do cost more than catalog costumes, but again, totally worth it. Our hotel fees are pretty comparable to the previous season as the number of required competitions does not change. That being said we will assess it if we want to do any additional conventions or competitions, which we typically do.

So to break it does in its simplest form... When my husband and I sit down to plan for our upcoming season we look at:

Number of dances

Competition fees

Costume fees

and Choreography fees

Hotel fees for REQUIRED competitions

Hotel fees for Optional competitions and conventions we want to go to.

*We don't really factor in tuition because that never changes. We always pay for the maximum amount of classes for her, at most, it may go up 5 dollars a month but not enough to break the bank.*

Another step in my planning process is booking hotels! DON'T WAIT! I sit down one day on a weekend, take out my list of competitions and conventions we are planning on attending, and book all the hotels I can. I always go to the competition/convention website first to see if they have a block rate available and if they do and it's the cheapest price, I book it. If not I will look for the hotel closest to the event location and book there, preferably a hotel I have points with. I also make sure that my reservation CAN be canceled if need be. You never know what's going to happen, we could change plans and not go, locations can change, and things can get canceled. I would hate to lose money on a hotel I don't stay at. Check out "Hotel Memberships" for other helpful tips.

I then add all the hotel information into the spreadsheet I mentioned in my previous blog about excel (linked at the beginning of this blog). This not only takes the stress of having to book a hotel last minute, not being close to the location, or not being able to stay in a decent safe place, but it also helps me budget for the price of the hotel. I also don't have to worry about hotels for the entire season, because they are already booked. I just have to show up, and we are good to go.

My daughter and I can eat pretty cheap when we travel, as we have a pretty good system in place for saving money. You can see my recommendations in my two blogs, "Travel must haves" and "Hotel Cookin"

As you can tell, most of the financial and schedule planning revolves around my daughter's schedule. For my son's season, we pay for the entire season up front and he only has to travel 3-5 times a year. It's very easy to plan. Side note, boys' competitive gymnastics is WAAAAYYYYY cheaper than competitive dance! It's crazy. I didn't believe his coach at first, but so far, so good.

I'm going to cut this blog here as it's getting lengthy. My next blog will start to dive into how we divide and conquer, and convention time!

-Rothrock Mom