Hurst,
It does sounds like it might be even harder to make an informed decision there in Charlotte than it is around here. It must be tough if a coach is calling to offer a position and wanting a decision before the player has had a chance to go to any other tryouts, or explore other possibilities.
Aside from pressuring for a decision though, I will say that I do like the idea of a phone call from the coach, assuming he/she is willing to have a discussion with a parent. One problem we encountered during this particularly stressful tryout time, was that after my daughter's tryout number was posted on a club's website as having been selected for one of the teams she had been trying out for, we tried to contact the coach to ask a few basic questions before deciding whether or not to accept the position (we had never met him, and, to our knowledge, there had been no parent information meetings that we could have gathered any information from). We never received a response, even to this day. Attempts to obtain his phone number were also unsuccessful. Granted, he could have been out of town or something else could have been happening that kept him from being able to respond, but I think it's unreasonable to expect a player's parents to put down the type of money for registration and uniforms that this particular club was requesting by a certain deadline, without a parent being allowed a chance to speak with the coach either by parent meeting, or individually, on the phone. It might be a pain to make themselves accessible to parents but, like it or not, parents are the paying customer, not to mention the guardians of the children in question, and I feel like a little communication up front goes a long way.
In contrast, we had a positive experience with the tryout experience at another club she tried out with. Feeling like I needed some help sorting out the particular tryout situation that was facing my daughter, with conflicting clubs and tryout times, etc., and wanting to make sure we were doing what would be in the best interest of our daughter, I decided to muster my courage and go straight to the top. I emailed Andrew Hyslop of CESA and CESA-Columbia for advice, and he phoned me back right away, and could not have been more helpful in figuring out how we should approach the tryout process, especially in the event of conflicting tryout times between clubs. He understood completely the need to tryout at different clubs (if not for the benefit of different options, then at the very least as a safeguard) and rather than trying to discourage her from trying out anywhere esle, he, in fact, gave me advice that was based on the desire not to jeopardize her chances of making the team for a competing club. On top of that, he welcomed my contacting him again if he could give any further advice. It was nice to be able to bend someone's ear (who had great expertise and experience in the subject at hand) about our particular situation and have an honest, genuine, helpful response based strictly on the best interest of our daughter. As it turns out, we also received 2 phone calls from the head coach of the CESA team our daughter ended up trying out for- once, just to give us an update on where things stood, and a 2nd time later, to let us know which team she had ultimately been chosen for. On top of that, we had a face-to-face discussion (at his request; imagine that!) after one of the tryouts. And let me emphasize that none of these discussions were about trying to woo us to CESA (our daughter is not a highly sought after superstar, by any means, although we feel she has untapped potential :-)); they were strictly about keeping us informed during the process. It seems apparent to me that the focus of CESA and CESA-Columbia is not on getting necessarily all the best players or having all the best teams, but on providing the very best services it can to the most people it can, letting the results take care of themselves, and letting their merits stand on their own.
