Sectionals

It's Sunday morning and I suppose I should write about what's happening this weekend. I'm sitting in the stands at the Christiansburg Aquatic Center, home of Virginia Tech swimming and venue for the Speedo Eastern Zone Sectional Championship swim meet. 

Although he's been swimming his whole life, my son came to club swimming late. Baseball was his priority until just last summer, when he decided that he wanted to swim in college. Most potential college swimmers begin year-round swimming at age 7 or so and have already committed to a college team by junior year. My son joined a club team just last September at the start of his senior year and made the PVS and Eastern Zone cuts his first year. I'm given to understand that this is a big deal. 

He's been here since Wednesday (again with the craziness of kids missing school to compete in a swim meet) and we drove down on Friday afternoon, 4.5 hours of mostly very pleasant driving through scenic central and southwestern Virginia. It's pretty here, mountains and valleys and clean fresh air. 

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Blacksburg, where we are staying, is a small college town. Virginia Tech drives the economy. I don't know how many people work at Tech but the hotels and restaurants and stores serve the Virginia Tech community and its guests, all of the alumni who attend sports events, all of the high school kids who come to visit the campus and the families who come to visit their children. I hate to boil people down to sociological and political ideas but it's hard to be here and not see that there are a lot of poor and working class people working very hard to take care of a lot of middle class and rich people. 

On Friday night, we had dinner at a local chain restaurant. Our waitress was lovely, so kind and cheerful, taking care of a ton of tables in a professional and efficient manner.   She was also missing a few front teeth. It made me sad to think that people are probably sometimes unkind to her because of that. And it made me mad to think that someone can work really hard and make a valuable contribution, and still not be able to afford dental care. Welcome to America. Teeth are for rich people. 

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Every hotel in the area is filled with swim teams and swim families. There are clubs from Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia and North Carolina. My son's club is staying at a Holiday Inn. Because I am a new club parent and not as tuned in to the meet schedule as more experienced parents, I didn't realize that I should have booked a room the moment he got the qualifying time. Instead, I just waited until he signed up for the meet and then found that almost every hotel room in Blacksburg and Christiansburg was booked. I was finally able to snag a room in a just-barely two-star Comfort Inn. 

This would have been fine, really. I don't care where we stay as long as it's clean and free of vermin. And trust me when I tell you that I checked the beds very carefully when we arrived. It was a simple double room with a decent bathroom, a little refrigerator, a TV so my husband could watch the Sweet 16, and a nice view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Totally fine for a two-day stay. 

We came back to the room after Saturday prelims to change (and I did such a terrible job of packing, but that's a whole other story, which I'll probably tell you at some point). It was 1:30 PM and the room hadn't been touched. I asked about this, thinking that our room had been inadvertently overlooked, and the front desk person told me that room cleaning was sometimes late. Then when we returned from lunch and sightseeing and bookstore shopping, and the room still wasn't clean, he told me that they were short staffed and that they weren't cleaning rooms unless the guest was checking out. Note that we paid surge pricing (230 a night for a room that usually goes for 79).. Here's an idea - if you're charging surge prices then pay surge wages, and then maybe you won't have a hard time keeping your hotel staffed. I shall be making exactly this point when I speak to the hotel's general manager on Monday to request a 50 percent refund. 

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Holy cow, the woman sitting in front of me is carrying a giant backpack and she is putting things into it and taking things out of it every 15 seconds. A lip balm out and a sweater in and a wallet out and a bag of snacks back in and a water bottle out and a water bottle back in and the sweater back out. Exhausting. I need a nap after watching this for ten minutes. 

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This is a big deal swim meet but it's also pretty much like every other swim meet. Parents in the stands comparing notes, and abruptly dropping out of conversations when their kids' heats are called, swimmers elated after best-ever swims and sad after disappointments in the water. Most of the parents were cool. There were a few of the type who hold forth loudly on qualifying times and college scouts and officials and whatever else that they know more about than anyone else, but only a few. 

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On Friday afternoon I spent the first 30 minutes of the drive thinking about everything I needed to do st home and how I wouldn't be able to do any of it from Blacksburg. And then I stopped thinking about that. I looked at trees and mountains. I flopped on the hotel room bed and read my book while my husband watched basketball. On Saturday we took my son for lunch at a deli on the Virginia Tech campus and then took him back to his hotel so he could rest before the evening session, and then we wandered around Barnes and Noble shopping for books and drinking paper cups of tea. We watched a lot of swimming. It was a good weekend. I need to get out of town more often. 

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As for the swimming my son was neither elated nor crushed. He did fine, and scored a relay spot on the last day. He enjoyed the camaraderie and the giant catered breakfasts and dinners and the cool sectionals team gear. Meanwhile, I sent a very polite email to the hotel manager, who responded with an even politer email apologizing for the housekeeping situation. She processed a 50 percent refund to my credit card. I didn't even have to fight city hall. Swimmers aren't the only people winning around here, I tell you what.