Saturday, April 15th was the first home track meet of the high school season. It was the 2nd Annual Crowe Classic JV Invitational, which Jeff started in memory of Dustin Crowe, the former Sunnyside High School head track coach who passed away a year and a half ago at age 41 from aggressive brain cancer. It was a great event in his name. Jeff was the meet host, announcer, and timer (normally there are 3 separate people for those jobs, but we had nobody to spare). Jeff volunteered me as tribute to be the head clerk. I didn't even know exactly what that job entailed, but I was willing to help. The night before the meet, Jeff told me "the clerk is the person with the clipboard telling runners were to go." It sounded simple enough. When I arrived at the meet, Jeff sent me to the infield with directions to "get the volunteers going." Whatever that meant! I knew Jeff was working on at least 15 different things at the same time and he wasn't trying to be difficult, so I tried my best to be helpful with no information.
I greeted the gathering of volunteers and told them we would have more information soon. Eventually, Jeff came by and handed me a stack of clipboards. Then he went off to take care of something else. Ok. I looked at the clipboards and started asking volunteers which events they wanted to help with. I had handed out two clipboards when Jeff returned with a bit more guidance and helped dispatch the volunteers to the various field events. All of the volunteers were heading to their field event stations (high jump, long jump, pole vault, shot put, and javelin), and I still had one clipboard left. We were short one set of volunteers! There was nobody to be in charge of the discus event. I was just trying to figure out who could be spared from other events to stretch our volunteers far enough to cover discus when a beautiful sight met my eyes.
One of my favorite families in all of Sunnyside was walking across the infield towards me. Five capable humans--two adults and three teenagers--willing and ready to help. I nearly crumpled in relief. They sacrificed their Saturday, accepted the clipboard and my brief instructions, and went forth to handle the discus event. Track meets cannot function without an army of volunteers, and we always seem to be short on helpers. Thanks to the Kannely family, we managed to clear the first hurdle of the day! All volunteers were in place before the meet began.
The first track event of the day was the 110 meter hurdles and I began to learn how to be a head clerk. I had two beginner assistant clerks with me in the center of the infield, and it was our job to check athletes in and let them know their assigned heat for each race. At the beginning of each race, a clerk reads out the athletes' names and puts them in their lanes. That sounds so simple, doesn't it?
Hahahahahaha!
It was a simple job, but incredibly complicated to carry out efficiently. And efficiency is vital to keep a track meet from bogging down and getting behind schedule. For the first hour or two of the meet, I did not realize how much of that efficiency rested on my shoulders as head clerk. The meet slowed to a crawl during the third event of the day: the 100 meter dash. Since it was a JV Invitational, entries were not capped, which meant each school could enter as many kids in each event as they wanted. (Non-JV meets generally cap at 5 entries per event per school.) That translated to massive quantities of kids running the sprint events. There were 25 heats of the 100 meter dash (15 boys heats, 10 for girls). 8-10 kids per heat. That came out to nearly 250 kids to check in and organize into heats for one event. And three humble newbie volunteer clerks to get the job done.
It was an absolute madhouse.
Thank goodness I brought my voice amplifying headset. Jeff's only tip to me as head clerk was to have athletes gather at the infield for each event, so we did that at first. It took us clerks at least ten heats of the 100 meter dash to figure out that this system did not work. During those first ten heats, the meet got farther and farther behind schedule. The worst part was, I had no idea we were getting behind because I was too busy to even look at my watch!
After a while, though, I saw that gathering the heats in center field and then leading them heat by heat all the way 50 meters away to the starting line was taking way too long. I called Jeff, who was stationed up in the press box working the automatic timing system. He said I could do my job however seemed best to me. I had Jeff announce over the loudspeaker for runners to report to the starting line instead of center field, and we started organizing kids much faster. The starter suggested that we follow usual protocol and stack each heat behind the starting line, with kids in their lanes. So heat 10 was on the line, and heats 11, 12, 13, and 14 were lined up behind them, ready to step forward when it was their turn to race. That worked like a charm. We got through the 100 meter race at last.
I was feeling a bit faint by then, so I peeked at my watch. It was almost 1:00 pm! My two-pieces-of-toast-and-OJ breakfast was a distant memory. I managed to get over to my backpack at center field, take a swig of water, and pull out a granola bar and baggie of peanut butter pretzels. I added them to my jacket pockets and ate as I worked. About an hour later, Jeff had a volunteer pick up Subway sandwiches for all of the volunteers. That turkey-on-white with cucumbers was like manna. It took about half an hour for the energy from the food to hit my bloodstream, but then I was back at full energy.
We had a creaky slow confusing start to the meet, and basically it was way more than half my fault that the meet ended almost 2 hours behind schedule, but... I survived! I learned a lot and improved my efficiency drastically throughout the day. By the time the 200 meter race rolled around (22 heats total), I had heat stacking down to an art and I was even able to sit down for 30-40 seconds at a time between heat calls. I wore my voice amplifier headset all day long and read hundreds of names, repenting repeatedly for every time I rolled my eyes at an official mispronouncing my name over the years. I butchered some names badly. Maybe if I only had to read a few names and I wasn't in a hurry I could've figured out how to pronounce them. But I had hundreds of names to read and the meet was behind schedule, so there was no time to sound them out or ask about pronunciation.
I am so grateful that I didn't know how big of a job being head clerk is before I got to the meet, because the night before (Friday) was the first night all week that I slept past 4am. The week was just so FULL of thoughts and responsibilities and plans, my brain kept waking me up too early. If I had known how much responsibility I was taking on at the meet on Saturday, it definitely would've interfered with my Friday night sleep.
The meet ended around 6pm. Jeff and I cleaned up and left the track at 7pm. I picked up burgers and our traditional fried asparagus from Burger Ranch on the way home, and then we settled in for almost 3 hours to enter the meet results online. My back was aching after the first hour. But I entered and checked all of the field events marks while Jeff did the running events. We worked on the girls 200m race together and then it was done! We finished officially at 9:50pm. Before 10pm--that's a new personal record for meet result entering and posting! At last my 12 hour day and Jeff's 14 hour day was over.
Jay, Rose, and Amber stayed home all day while we were working at the meet. I was a little jealous of their relaxing Saturday of down time. I forgot to tell them to clean the bathroom, but I did tell them to limit their screen time. So, a trade-off type of mom-win.
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