The 10-Hour-Week Admin Nightmare

The glow of Mia’s laptop screen painted her freckled cheeks pale blue at 7:47 p.m. on Sunday, the air in her bedroom thick with the sour smell of cold iced coffee and the faint, citrusy scent of the lemon Pledge she’d sprayed on her desk three days prior and never gotten around to wiping off. Her 13-inch MacBook Air, the one she’d bought with birthday money last year, was plastered with neon soccer stickers and a faded sticker of the World Cup trophy, its screen split between three windows: a half-finished monthly budget spreadsheet for the Shoreline Youth Soccer Club, a folder of 17 unorganized PDF scans of membership registration forms, and a text chain with her U16 teammates blowing up with question marks about the upcoming beach cleanup event. To her left sat a half-meter-high stack of printed registration forms, each emblazoned with the club’s logo of a kid kicking a soccer ball over a wave, the paper crinkled at the edges from being crumpled and re-smoothed so many times. To her right, her old beat-up Windows laptop—her mom’s hand-me-down from 2020—was propped open, its screen filled with grainy scans of parents’ handwritten emergency contact forms, some scrawled in cursive so messy she’d had to Google “how to read cursive handwriting” last month just to decipher a kid’s last name.

Her phone buzzed on the desk, the screen lighting up with a text from Coach Ramirez: “Mia where r u? Everyone’s here for practice, we’re doing scrimmages first.” Her stomach dropped. She’d forgotten all about practice, buried under a stack of forms that wouldn’t quit. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, typing out the lie she’d rehearsed three times already that week: “Coach so sorry I have a fever I can’t move I’m gonna stay home tonight.” She hit send before she could second-guess herself, then dropped her head into her hands, the guilt pricking at her throat like a swallowed bug. She’d been the team’s vice captain for eight months now, the person Coach Ramirez relied on to handle all the admin work after the previous vice captain quit to focus on college apps, and she’d already lied to him twice this month to skip practice and finish paperwork. The team’s runner-up trophy from the fall league sat on her shelf behind her, the gold base glinting in the lamplight, and she stared at it like it was judging her.

Another buzz, this time from the team group chat. It was Lila, her best friend and the team’s striker, the girl who could score a goal from midfield without breaking a sweat: “Mia you said you’d book the beach cleanup site today!! We already bought gloves and trash bags and vegan cookies for after, we just need you to send the sign-up link and confirm the location. Everyone’s asking me where it is and I have no clue what to tell them.” Mia’s throat tightened. She’d promised Lila she’d handle the site booking three days prior, then spent three straight nights finishing the club’s monthly membership report instead. She typed out a half-hearted apology, hit send, and then threw her phone onto her bed so hard it bounced off the mattress and hit the wall.

She’d taken on the admin work last year because Coach Ramirez had begged her, saying no one else on the team had the patience to fill out the state youth sports compliance forms, and she’d wanted to impress him, to prove she was responsible enough to be vice captain. She’d thought it would be an hour a week, tops. Now, ten months later, she counted the hours in her head like she was counting soccer stats: three hours every first Sunday of the month sorting through 50+ handwritten registration forms, correcting typos (half the parents wrote their kid’s name wrong, half missed the emergency contact field entirely, and one mom had written her phone number as “555-1234” with no area code, which had taken Mia 45 minutes to track down), calling the ones with missing info, and entering everything into the club’s membership spreadsheet. Two and a half hours every week sorting through PDFs of payment receipts, permission slips, and medical forms that parents sent via email, text, or even Instagram DM, renaming every file from “IMG_20240512_1532.pdf” to “FirstName_LastName_Activity_Date.pdf” and sorting them into folders for “payments,” “permission slips,” and “medical forms,” then cross-referencing the payment files with the membership spreadsheet to pull a list of families who hadn’t paid their monthly dues to send to the club treasurer. Two hours every first Sunday building the monthly budget spreadsheet, adding up field rental fees, equipment costs, tournament entry fees, and snack money, then cross-checking every number three times because she’d messed up the equipment budget two months prior and accidentally told Coach Ramirez they had $200 extra for new jerseys, only to find out they were $200 short and had to cancel the order, making the whole team mad. One hour every week sending practice and event reminders to 32 families, answering the same 15 questions about “what time is practice” and “can my kid bring a friend” over and over again. And then there were the random one-off tasks: last month she’d spent three hours redoing the club’s membership handbook because Coach Ramirez had decided to change the late fee policy the day before it was due to the state youth sports association. Add it all up, and she was spending ten hours a week on admin work, every single week, no exceptions. Ten hours she could have spent studying for her algebra test, or going to soccer practice, or hanging out with her friends, or even just sleeping. Last week she’d stayed up until 1 a.m. finishing the membership report, and she’d bombed her algebra quiz the next day, scoring a 62% that had dropped her grade from a B+ to a C-. Her mom had yelled at her for “wasting time on that soccer club stuff” and threatened to make her quit if her grades didn’t go back up, and she’d sat there at the dinner table, silent, because she couldn’t tell her mom the truth: the soccer club wasn’t the problem, the admin work was. If she quit the admin work, she’d have to quit the team entirely, because no one else would do it, and she couldn’t imagine not playing soccer. It was the only thing that made sense when everything else felt like chaos.

She grabbed her phone and opened her contacts, scrolling past “Lila,” “Coach Ramirez,” and “Mom (Do Not Answer If Grumpy)” to Javi’s name. Javi was a junior at the high school she’d be attending next year, a kid she’d met at a coding camp the summer before, when she’d signed up for the “Intro to Game Design” class on a whim because she’d thought it would be fun to learn how to make her own soccer video game. He’d been the camp counselor, the kind of kid who wore a different Marvel hoodie every day, had a robotics trophy taller than his little sister on his desk, and could explain how to code a moving character in Minecraft in 10 minutes flat, no jargon. She’d texted him a few times after the camp to ask stupid questions about her laptop, and he’d told her once that he used Python to automate his homework, which she’d thought was the coolest thing she’d ever heard. She hit call, and he picked up on the second ring, his face popping up on the screen, hair still damp from basketball practice, a half-empty can of root beer on the desk behind him next to a pile of circuit boards.

“Rough week?” he asked before she could even speak, and that was all it took for the tears to well up in her eyes. She told him everything, the whole mess: the registration forms, the PDFs, the budget spreadsheet, the lie to Coach Ramirez, the fight with Lila, the algebra quiz, her mom yelling at her. She didn’t leave anything out, and Javi listened, not interrupting, not making fun of her for crying, just nodding until she was done.

“Okay, first off, you’re an idiot for lying to Coach Ramirez,” he said when she finished, and she huffed a wet laugh. “But second, you don’t have to do all that stuff manually. You know I told you I use Python f