I was talking with another local youth pastor the other night (hey, Vicki!) and we were discussing scheduling challenges with our youth ministries. We want to schedule things when the maximum number of students can attend, as well as being considerate of family schedules and - especially - school schedules and potential conflicts. Vicki's idea was to create a master calendar with all of the church activities listed along with all of the school activities. It would be something we could use and also share with parents and students.
Thanks to the flexibility of Google Calendar, I think we solved the problem. I spent some time the other day and imported all of Pine City High School's fall sports and music events from their web site into a public Google Calendar. If you've not used Google Calendar before, you'll want to check it out because it's pretty slick. Just do a search of public calendars for Pine City High School, (or click that link) and add it to your list of calendars. Then do the same for Journey North Church to add our calendar. Then you can create your own personal calendar and manage your entire schedule from one place, or print it out to put on your fridge (if you have a color printer each type of calendar event will print in it's own color, making it very easy to figure out what's what).
The bonus is that there are a bunch of great public calendars you can add to your list (I have the Green Bay Packers schedule on mine!) You can toggle the different calendars on and off if you wish, as well.
The only downside is that I will likely not be able to keep the Pine City High School events up to date if there are changes (one of the reasons I've only added fall sports so far - plus I haven't had time yet). For that you'll need to go to their web site. (Maybe I can get them to start using Google Calendar, too!?) Let me know if that's helpful to you, because we could create separate calendars for each sport (if you only wanted to add football, or just tennis, etc.) or for each grade (just 8th grade sports, etc.). It would only take a few minutes but I'm not going to do those if nobody's interested. So drop me a note and tell me what you think.