Regatta Central

This past week we had the first large event that I actively participated in on Tempe Town Lake.

It was hard work, but in the end we managed to do it. I wrote a post about this a very weeks ago, but Desert Sprints- the name of the event- was executed last Saturday. We spent a week putting it up and a day taking it down. Alicia, Ryan, and an entire team of members worked for months to ensure everything from bathrooms and security to parking spots for all the teams were taken care of.  The week leading up to the race, I spent nearly a total of 30 hours helping Alicia and Ryan putting in the race course and bringing out supplies from storage for the race.

The amount of people that volunteered for the event was amazing. Both setting up the course, and to help with the racing the day of. There was a group of 7 to 10 people including my self and my bosses that helped put in the race course, and then the day of racing we had to have almost 140 volunteers to make sure everything went smoothly that day.

Volunteers were needed for parking, registration, gear sales, clean up, safety both on and off the water, at the finish line, at the start line, and individuals needed to be in Stake Boats- which are stationary floating boats where people sit and hold on to the racing shells at the beginning of races so the boats don't float off before the start of the race. Alicia worked closely with one specific woman within the City of Tempe that helps wrangle volunteers together for events like this. I would not want to have her job. Getting 140 volunteers or more for events larger than ours would be so difficult and tedious because you never know who's going to show up and who isn't.

The setting up was long, but just tedious. The day of was a little chaotic, because there were so many people. And the day after was just plain over kill. It is difficult to take something down in a day that took four days to put up.

But Alicia got it done. I wasn't much help the last day because I got a sinus infection after working all day on Saturday but Alicia...man that lady can move when she wants to get something done. She is definitely someone I model myself after. I don't know how she does it.