Soccer, golf and details

Zach is playing soccer for the first time this Fall. He loves his coach and loves to scrimmage. The only problem is that he doesn't like it when people beat him to the ball. Yesterday he tripped a girl and grabbed another girl's jersery to pull her back towards him. Zach's only defense was that he didn't want to lose. Since Zach's coach hadn't seen either one of these things happen, I asked him to talk to Zach about it. Zach still doesn't want to loose. We'll see how that works out in a game when some parent gets mad at me because Zach has done that to their sweet precious little girl.

Today is the Fisher House Golf Tournament here at Ft Bragg. After all of my work in SA, this is an organization that is dear to my heart. Last week I decided to call the FH manager to see if I could help out the day of the tournament. During the course of our phone call, I could tell that the manager didn't think she needed any more help. In my experience at the golf tournaments, last minute things always poppped up, so we welcomed extra hands. I made a compromise with the FH manager: I would show up at the tournament, and if they didn't have anything for me to do, I wouldn't stay. I kept wondering how she could be so confident that there wouldn't be anything for me to do. She mentioned something about having a detail out there to help.

Today is a perfect day for a golf tournament: the weather turned out to be a beautiful, sunny 70, with a slight breeze. The "detail", I figured out, included people to set up tables, tents, unload all of the goodie bags, raffle prizes, extra give aways, fill coolers, and man the check-in/registration table. One other volunteer showed up, and we handed out goodie bags and arranged coffee mugs on a table. I could see why the manager knew she didn't need my help. Who needs untrained volunteers when you've got a paid staff ready to go? (Especially when someone else is paying that staff.) On the whole, it was a well-run tournament with free food, free water and gatorade, and most importantly to the players, free beer. A local Bud Light distributor donated a truck that turned into a mobile tap, so the guys had free beer on tap starting at 10:30 this morning. That doesn't include the free beer in the beverage carts that rolled out at 9am. I tried to get the FH manager to ask for donations for the beer. IMO, that could be a huge money maker. Isn't that the whole point of a bar? I'm just saying. One of the GS employees informed me that it would be ghetto to ask someone to pay for that which had been donated. We found something to hold donations for the beer and someone volunteered to sit there, but got busy and so no one left a donation. I could just see the dollar signs being poured into those styrofoam cups. All in all, it seemed to be a successful tournament. The players were happy; their $55 was well worth it. No worrying on the part of the organizers about how much the raffles, mulligans, auctions, etc would bring in.

I have no idea how much money this tournament will raise, but I could see that the civilian sector stepped up with sponsorships and paid for their entire teams to play. While it wasn't $40K, the Dominion, two meals, and amazing prizes/auction items, everyone seemed much happier and much more relaxed. I don't think the FH manager was developing an ulcer like Elizabeth, JimmieAnn and I did. I remarked to my golf tournament friends how fabulous it felt to just show up and volunteer instead of being in charge of the tournament!

What I can't figure out is how we missed out on that "detail" at Fort Sam. I'm working on how to turn my kids into a "detail."