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Show Many Summer Activities Available for Kids By Ernie Milner Throughout the past years, summer has always al-ways been a time of play for youngsters. Things haven't changed too much in that respect. However, the things that are available for the youth today far outnumber outnum-ber the different types of recreation even ten years ago. For instance, in the Grand County Recreation Re-creation program this summer, softball for girls is available along with adult programs for men and women. Little League baseball and Pony League are supplemented supple-mented by the T-League program for boys. During the past few years, a complete swimming swim-ming program has been established and a new first rate golf program has begun to bloom. In other days, the only recreation was an occasional occa-sional game of baseball on the sandlots throughout through-out the country. Now, a full slate of activities has taken the place of that and it requires many hours of volunteer work to handle the variety of activities. Volunteer coaches for the girls softball program pro-gram and the boys T-League, T-League, Little League and Pony League are currently in the process of building their teams for action. Many of the coaches have been in the programs for more years than they like to name. This is usually a "thankless job, taking them away from needed jobs around the home and often making them and their charges late for dinner every night of the summer. Many mothers have completely given up the thought of a regular hour for serving evening meals. One new and apparently apparent-ly nearly forgotten sport that has taken a great stride in recent years is motorcycle riding. Not all youths can participate partici-pate in this sport because be-cause of the amount of "bikes" that are now in use daily by the local youth, there should be some place made available avail-able near the city so that they can ride their bikes under supervision and without disturbing the neighbors. One location was made available recently with the advent of Motocross racing, but the location is too far from town to make it possible for the riders to get to and from it easily. More and more areas in town that have been used for riding have been closed and this makes it hard for a youngster that does not have a drivers license to ride without breaking some kind of law. Even transporting the bikes to and from an area is sometimes a burden bur-den on the parents, espe- cially when the bike is too cumbersome to fit in the trunk of a car. Hopefully, in the very near future, a spot near town can be made available avail-able for youthful riders and possibly some supervision su-pervision can be made available. Extra permits have been purchased by some to make it possible to ride the bikes on government gov-ernment administered land but it is nearly impossible im-possible to get to that land to ride. Possibly in the future, a program can be set up to give needed supervision supervi-sion to youthful riders so that they can ride in an area that will not disturb local residents and make bad feelings into worse than just that. |