Mentor Night at the Rose Garden

I am the head of a mentor program for elementary age children who live with moms in a recovery program.  On Sunday, the other mentors and I took them to watch the Blazers stomp on the Wolves. With all the talk about Blazers Edge Night I thought I would share my experience.

First, let me say that taking a group of nine 5-10 year old children, some of whom with high propensities toward wandering/running away when they are over stimulated to a Blazer game was a frightening task.  I had visions of children drowning in the sea of people embarking/disembarking the max, and was convinced that we would have at least one child become impatient with the game and decide to liven things up by playing hide-n-seek in the bleachers.  Thankfully, nothing of that sort happened.

What did happen was perhaps a little less adrenaline filled, but was interesting nonetheless. We had packed dinners and planned to eat them in the car and on the max ride from Lloyd Center, which worked fine for most of the children, but there was one who had not yet gotten to her soda, and when she found out that it had to be thrown away before she could go into the arena she promptly sat down on the pavement and began screaming.

We braced ourselves for an eventful evening.

If you have spent much time with 10 year old boys you will know that they have no patience for things which they deem...uncool.  When I tried to convince the students I was with that we should hold hands so that no one got lost I quickly learned that that was just not going to happen. I tried just holding on to the sleeves of their jackets instead and found myself holding two empty coats. Throughout the night this battle ensued, me attempting to keep them within reach and them trying to stay just out of it. I think it ended up a draw, but there were times I thought I would soon be joining the Timberwolves in hopeless failure.

  The kids all got tickets to the game free for participating in Multnomah County Library's Summer Reading Program,  to their delight (which was almost as great as mine). This was a first game for many of the children, and I think they had some pretty high expectations.  You could almost feel their spirits sink as we climbed higher and higher to reach our seats in section 324, row P (I, on the other hand, was pleasantly surprised to find that there were actually worse seats than ours). The children's spirits continued to bleed out as they watched section after section get various prizes while they got none. We needed to act quickly, I went with a band-aid. "Hey man, we already won free stuff, we got these tickets! That is awesome right?" Other mentors with more experience with this sort of thing pulled out the tourniquet, and suddenly the whole row was munching down cotton candy, pop corn, and liquorish ropes. I soon followed their lead, but having little funds and only a card to purchase things with, I took my student to a kiosk and purchased him a kids meal (possibly the closest thing to a good deal in the whole building).

Getting the students excitement about the game back took some doing. We mentors all began to whoop it up in hopes that the kids would soon join in. For about a quarter and a half mentors hooted and hollered to seemingly no avail. I had all but given up on them participating in the night's rowdiness, when I noticed that my mentee was yelling whenever the Wolves had free throws. We then began a game of "getting into the heads" of the wolves, and predicting how many shots the blazers would make during their attempts at the freethrow line, and weather they would rim in or swish. The children started jumping up when there was a dunk or block. The soda, cotton candy, snow cones, and liquorice were doing their work. The promise of a free chalupa at 100 points didn't hurt either.

We only had one casualty to sleep, 8 for 9 is not too bad.

We left the building thoroughly satisfied. Most kids came down gently from their sugar high and passed the rest of the night in the tired bliss that follows a night of such excitement, with one exception. One of the girls had grown quite attached to her snow cone straw, going so far as to name it "Strawy". She dropped it on the ground a few times and was putting it back in her mouth, and when it hit the ground at the max station it was the (insert straw saying here). Strawy had to be thrown away, and she wailed about it for probably 45 minutes.

I think that the incident with "Strawy" was indicative of how special the night was for the kids. The girl valued the experience so much that she wanted to hold on to anything and everything she could that reminded her of it. Since Sunday I have been thanked several times a day for organizing the event. The kids are all more interested in basketball and it gave us mentors a chance to spend a big chunk of time with our students. So I guess the moral of the story is...every kid should get free season tickets? Maybe not, but if you get the chance to take/send a kid you should do it. It was a lot of fun.

One note of caution, there was at least one incident of someone being up all night sick from sugar intake, so maybe, much like a tourniquet, use sugary items only as a last resort.