Saturday Doug and I took 7 pre-teen girls to a pre-game sorority activity. The other adult who sometimes helps the troop refused to participate because of the inappropriateness of mixing pre-teens with college students and the horrible traffic on campus. We parked a few feet from the event and paid no parking fee. The Girl Scouts were given sorority t-shirts and the sorority sisters introduced themselves as though they were peers. They were polite and funny and allowed girls who feel stuck between childhood and adolescence to feel important and useful.

One of our concerns was how the girls would handle being around older teens and adults who were drinking alcohol. Although we knew that a LOT of people were drinking, the UT fans and students were discrete and we didn’t see any erratic behavior with two exceptions. The first incident was when we took the girls to the restroom. We had to choose between entering the fraternity houses to use the restroom and walking to another campus building. Memories of fraternity bathrooms and the open bars made it easy to choose walking to Stokely. A female college student was in the bathroom umm, trying to remove the alcohol and other contents of her stomach while her friends tried to get her stable enough to return to her dorm room. Not a great scene, but it could have been worse. The second incident was a male college student who imho was acting more intoxicated than he truly was and wearing a Florida t-shirt. He offered a 13-year-old Girl Scout a beer. The sorority sisters quickly intervened but this young man should have had to call his parents and the girl’s parents and explain why he offered alcohol to a child. I can only hope it wasn’t this guy.