Burnaby sports and rec sign up headaches prompt calls for change

Some parents in Burnaby are calling for the city’s parks and recreation department to overhaul its registration system, saying it’s incredibly difficult to sign up their kids for various programs.

Each season, Burnaby father and parenting blogger Michael Kwan prepares ahead of time by gathering the various barcodes for the programs his daughter is interested in.

He says he logged in well ahead of registration and hoped for the best, acting as if he were trying to land an in-demand concert ticket.

However, despite his best efforts, Kwan tells CityNews his tactics didn’t work this time, meaning his daughter has been put on a waitlist for basketball.

“I continually hit refresh for the next 15, 30, 45 minutes, and this morning it ended up being almost an hour that I kept hitting refresh. By the time the site actually loaded again, it said that I had been logged out because of a period of inactivity,” he explained.

Kwan says he would like to see some changes.

“I think just having some sort of fallback on the system so that when we are on the website, it doesn’t just show an error, it doesn’t crash. I know that there are systems that are available like virtual queues,” he said.

“Every time they release new programs, so every quarter or so I guess they release new programs, it’s been the same experience every time. I appreciate that it’s meant to be that you can conveniently register online … but every time, when the programs are released at 10 a.m. the website just stops working.”

On Twitter, Burnaby’s parks and recreation department has apologized to parents suggesting if the online system is at capacity, they should try again in a few minutes.

But the issues don’t seem to be isolated to online registration. Rachel Degraw says she tried the in-person route.

“It’s always quite a process on registration days. So there’s different days — one for swim, one for cultural, and one for sport,” she explained.

“It’s best to show up two hours plus early, grab a number, and wait to register in person. Otherwise, you have to, you and your partner, play the phone lines and it can take hours to get through.”

Despite showing up more than an hour and a half before registration, Degraw says she was seventh in line. She wasn’t able to get her kids into all the programming she’d hoped for.

“People, they work the phones or they come two and a half hours early. I’m a working mom. It’s not just programming, there’s also Pro-D day camps for my school-aged children, so having care for them,” Degraw said.

While her family has opted for private programming in some cases, she understands that isn’t an option for everyone.

She also points out not everyone can be there physically.

“I run a business from home so in front of me is my computer. So while I waited, I worked, and that’s how I was able to make it work for me. But for those who need to be in an office setting, that wouldn’t work and they probably would not be able to get their kids registered. That’s unfortunate,” she said.

“It is a challenge so if they could add as much programming as possible and upgrade the web. It’s a very old-school web system.”

This isn’t a problem that’s isolated to Burnaby either. CityNews has heard from parents with similar complaints in other Metro Vancouver cities.