Ultimate Pain

Sometimes I wonder why I get myself into things. A few months ago I organised an Ultimate (you'll find out soon enough!) tournament for companies. No one had ever run one before, so we weren't sure how it would turn out. I wsa the person who really pushed for it to happen and did a lot of the convincing to pull it off. It proved to bea reasonable success - six teams and a pretty good time. Only one injury and it was to me (a very badly bruised knee, a month out and not being able to sleep properly for a week were my rewards).

A few weeks ago, someone suggested we should run another tournament. Since I'd run the first one, it seemed a logical choice to run this one. I'd managed to put away from my mind what a pain it was to put on, and just think about the good things.

The first couple of weeks went well - lots of interest. In fact at one point we had a potential eight teams. One week later and suddenly we were down to 4.5 teams. Not good. The tournament's on Saturday (two days from now) so I spent a good part of today sending out emails, trying to sort out people to play. One particularly promising lead was from one of the usual corporate teams who couldn't field a team. A few hours later they came back to me. "We can't enter a half team, but we'll enter a whole team....". Aaaaaaaaaaaaah, no!!!!!! So now I have 4.5 teams. In fact, I only need a couple more players and I could make up the sixth and final team.

So I've contacted the only two people who I could think might be able to field a vaguely corporate team at such short notice, but to no avail...

Tomorrow I'll get down on my knees and beg some of my Ultimate colleagues to help out. I'm sure we'll find someone!

So why do I bother? Well the truth of the matter is I'm a born organiser. I don't really think I'm a leader, but I make a good administrator. Sad eh? I've got a series of mini-tournaments coming up over the winter - the London Indoor Winter League. Should be interesting - I've never really organised anything where people are paying genuine money to enter - £25 a team this time.

Oh, and I still haven't sorted out a trophy for Saturday!