The Joys of Change or How We Entertained 27 Teens

So today we were supposed to go into Chicago to explore. The students were excited about the opportunity. However, with so many of our chaperones needing to fly home last night to make it back in time for Parent-Teacher Conferences (which the coaching staff misses because the tournament doesn’t finish until tonight for some participants), we were going to have to do multiple shuttle runs to the commuter train station and then would be walking all over the city.

Mother Nature was not a fan of this idea. The rain, thunder, and lightening woke us up long before our planned meeting time and the two of us taking the kids on this expedition needed to change up plans and fast. Our third coach was already at the tournament, so anything we did with our students, it couldn’t be far and it couldn’t be expensive.

So I hopped on Yelp and got to work. I love using Yelp to find food options but it also worked in this case for entertainment. We quickly found a bowling alley/arcade nearby and a movie theatre just a couple blocks from that. So we took the kids to the bowling alley where they had inter-squad challenges and when they got bored they wandered into the arcade or got to play pool with each other. The onto the movie theatre for two and a half hours of Harry Potter. Not quite the day we had planned but one the students hopefully enjoyed.