raenndrops
Coach
First name, last initial, team is great ... as long as their aren't 3 "Ellie B" in one age group at one gym - and only 1 has an easy to pronounce last name .My biggest beef is someone needs to make a unilateral decision to call the kids names out for awards as "First Name, Last INITIAL, Gym name". I can't tell you how many times an announcer stumbled through awards (usually some poor parent roped into it) in the last two years. One gym did the First Name, Last Initial, Gym name and it went SO much smoother. Sure there are hard to pronounce first names, but they are much fewer and further between than last names that are hard to pronounce.
Some meets we get t's, a few (VERY FEW) we get leos. Generally it's a tshirt coupon for the basic meet tshirt if it's anything. By far though, my second biggest issue is seating. If your gym doesn't have safe seating for the amount of parents the size of the session will bring in (and aunts/uncles/brothers/sisters/etc...) then find an alternate venue or join with a larger gym to host the meet there.
One of the meets we went to with not enough seating chose to hold smaller sessions. There were approximately 120 girls scheduled for the meet. EASILY a regular venue could do 60ish per session. Knowing they had limited seating, they did sessions of 35-42 ... then had to move back the start of the meet by 4 hours due to weather (announced at 8pm the night before)... and had several scratches, ending up with fewer than 68 girls TOTAL.