If you had asked me 10 years ago what the rules of a potluck were, I would have said they started and ended with make sure you have enough to share. But after ushering my kids through 13 seasons of baseball, seven seasons of soccer and one season of cross-country, I am a little more seasoned at potlucking.

There are many, many rules of potlucking … all of them unspoken.

Never sign up to bring just rice. Make sure you sign up for at least one main dish every season. If you’re team mom, it doesn’t mean you get to assign yourself to all the easy grab-and-go snack shifts while assigning other parents to bring full meals for all the players and their families. If you do not follow these rules, you won’t be kicked off the team but the other parents will notice and snicker.

When in doubt, barrels of Zippy’s chili and rice please every crowd; trays of chicken katsu from Sumo Ramen are good, too. Make sure there’s a fresh fruit or veggie option on the table, even if most of the kids bypass it.

If your kid gets sick on potluck day, you can’t back out and leave the other parents in a lurch; you still need to show up with the food you promised.

But if your game gets rained out, you’re off the hook. That is unless they schedule a make-up game. Then even if you already woke up early to make the fixings for kalua pork sliders on that rained-out game day and got stuck eating kalua pork from your freezer for a month, you still have to provide a post-game meal on the make-up game day, though not necessarily kalua pork if you’re sick of it.

And never, ever, no matter how much you need one more pair of chopsticks, mess with another parent’s potluck gear.

I thought everyone understood these rules by the time the kids were in middle school. But as I sat in the Wilson Park pavilion with the other baseball parents, someone raided my potluck stash, left 20 feet away from where I sat to kapu our potluck area.

The thief stole my bag of forks, my box of Ziploc bags and my favorite pizza cutter with the red happy-face cover. He or she left the plates, napkins and utensil caddy, but took my tongs and big black garbage bag. Fortunately, the pizza I was scheduled to provide hadn’t been delivered yet, the cookies and oranges were still in the car and the family I was partnered with (who had a sick daughter that day) hadn’t dropped off their sandwiches yet.

I felt violated and perplexed. Who could be so desperate that they’d steal potluck supplies? Who would spoil the post-game fun for a bunch of kids?

I dashed to Longs to replace the forks and other lost items, but I couldn’t replace the feeling of kinship with my fellow park-goers as I surveyed my surroundings with a new wariness.

Several months later, I’m still searching for another happy-face pizza cutter and that naive, happy trust.

And, Rule No. 1 has become: Keep your potluck supplies close.

“She Speaks” is a weekly column by the women writers of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Reach Donica Kaneshiro at dkaneshiro@staradvertiser.com.