A Dad's Diary by Clayton Frech - August 18th, 2021

This blog post originated from Clayton’s Frech’s personal Facebook page. He is chronicling his journey as a dad with his son that is headed to Tokyo.

Yesterday it was raining in in LA. It never rains in LA. Like never. So strange. I feel like it's good luck.

Again, I had a full and productive day before Team Ezra saw any daylight! I actually had a fun day visiting facilities and venues for Angel City Sports.

People gathered around for USA celebration.

I ran quickly into the office to get Angel City swag for Ezra, LaTi and I to give away while in Japan. Then took my brilliant and business-savvy 12 year-old son Gabe with me to check out a warehouse sub-lease we are thinking about taking on for Angel City.

The concept would be to create an Adaptive Sports and Recreation Center in this warehouse. A place where we could do sports, loan equipment out, repair equipment, and generally expose people to the incredible world of adaptive sports on an on-going basis. One of our major challenges to building out adaptive sports programming in Southern California has been facilities. We have the equipment and we can find the coaches (I have a number of expert coaches on my staff and dozens of willing coaches). But this would be a HUB for the broader community…. Super cool if we can pull it off. (To pull this off, we will need new donors and sponsors FYI - please DM me with ideas!)

Then scoped out a couple additional facilities for future programming. We have been building partnerships with the community since 2013 with the intention of being able to scale up programming. We are getting very close to this…. If anybody tells you non-profit work is easy, they are wrong, or highly likely to be wrong. But I promise you that persistence in building and investing in relationships will eventually pay.

Ezra woke up late afternoon in time for a massage and then we had a really fun, socially distant, drive-by with a small group of friends and family. There were signed, flags, and balloons! Neighbors drove back and forth honking. It was really sweet. I only had one donut - Ezra resisted.

Table full of USA-themed treats.

We grabbed another wonderful dinner from my mother-in-law and then headed home to do a final “fake packing” (real packing to happen today)…. I am definitely gaining weight with the stress of the trip, lack of surfing, and eating like a king with Bahar and my mother-in-law’s cooking! Ezra’s bags are pretty much packed and look great – he actually fits in one checked bag. Advise has been to pack lightly as he will get a TON more clothing once in Japan. I still have some work to do… 

Final Flight Preparations

Then we sat down to make sure our covid tests, activity plan, and all the applications are set for us to get through the travel side of things on Friday. With our negative tests from the day before, we had to load lots of personal and travel information into an app that will ensure we are following all of the covid protocols while in Japan. We are going to be tested every day while in Japan, starting at the Tokyo Airport. We have to report whether we feel any symptoms. We are part of a contact tracing program. We are all under very strict rules to ensure the safety of the Games. While I cringe at paperwork like this, I have to say this was an extremely thorough process they put together. And with the Delta variant, it seems fully appropriate. Imagine the athlete village with delta spreading like wildfire. If it caught on early it could easy destroy athletes’ ability to compete. SO this is really a good thing, broad strokes. It’s just been a stressor, sort of the daunting task looming over us. But we got through it.

Tomorrow (Thursday 8/19) is our final prep/packing/errands day! Let’s do this!

Clayton