A Week on Our Own

Sorry I don’t have any cool pictures to post. I have been really awful at taking pictures of all of the stuff we have been doing and the places we have been so hopefully I will get better soon! I am just going to pick up where I left off and let ya’ll know what has been going on the past few days! Confession-I actually started writing this a few days ago and our internet wasn’t working in Columbia very well. For those of you who are interested, I am currently in Farmington, PA for the Nemacolin Junior Classic but I am going to attempt to fill in the days since I last posted and hopefully catch up from there!

Sunday, as I said before, was the qualifier. Just in case you don’t know, a qualifier is for the kids who didn’t initially make the cut for the tournament field to play their way in to the tournament. For example, on Sunday the qualifier boys were playing for ten spots in the tournament and the girls were playing for two. Every day we are all assigned various jobs to take care of during the day. On Sunday morning, I was in charge of making sure all the carts were ready to go (it was a shotgun start so there had to be two carts per hole for the groups to take out to where they were starting) and I was also the volunteer coordinator. It was my first time doing volunteers so it was little hectic but I got everything figured out with the help of our tournament director this week, A.J. In general, this week has been pretty crazy because it is the first time we are on our own to figure stuff out, especially on the comms side of things. The past two weeks we have had a full-time comms staff member on site helping us so it definitely feels different and more stressful to be on our own. Anyway, after I was done with the volunteers it was time to head out to the course to work as a rules official! For those of you who know me, you are probably wondering how in the world I can be a rules official when I have never played a round of golf before in my life. Well obviously they gave us a little bit of training on how to handle rules situations before we got on the road but every tournament also has a senior rules official who walks us through how to handle rulings. So basically my job is to follow my assigned groups and, if they need help, I will call in the situation on my radio to the SRO and he/she will walk me through it. The hardest part is administering it the right way but I haven’t run into anything out of my league just yet and hopefully I will never have to. Sunday’s qualifier was a doozy because the course was pretty difficult so we were running into A LOT of rulings/pace of play issues. Then, when most groups had about 4 holes left to play, a storm came through. We ended up having to delay the qualifier almost two hours! We didn’t get done until 9 and then Greg and I had a lot of post round things to do. We finally got back to the hotel around 12, so the day turned out to be pretty brutal and I am praying that next week we don’t have any delays. So far, we have had one each tournament we have been to.

Monday is our practice round/Junior-Am day. It is a pretty busy day but it is actually one of my favorites. It is fun to meet all the kids for the first time and everyone that plays in the Junior-Am is pretty cool too. Originally, Steve Spurrier was on our list to come out on Monday but he turned out to be too busy. Personally, I think he was probably intimated by the SEC powerhouse that is our team. We have two people from UT, one from Alabama and A.J. went to Georgia. On Monday, I signed up kids for the practice round, got all the documents ready for registration later that day and took pictures. Registration documents are a serious pain especially since our copier and printer this week have been seriously malfunctioning. This week we had to make about 100 copies of around 9 documents and put them all into envelopes for registration. We go through A LOT of paper. After all of that was finished I went out to take pictures of Junior-Am registration and then pictures of the Junior-Am teams out on the course. Then I went to a Walgreen’s to get the team pictures developed because we put them in frames signed by the juniors and give them out as a gift at the Junior-Am banquet. Everything after that was just preparing for the first round the next day which includes printing/proofing scorecards, putting together staff packets and other little jobs. We got done pretty early that day which was a nice break considering the late night we had before.

Tuesday was the first round and from what I can remember from this point was pretty uneventful. I was in charge of volunteers again that morning and also took care of some little jobs here and there before I had to get out on the course to get to work. Around 10:30, I headed out to No. 13 to take action photos. We take action shots of every player in the field so it is an extremely long process. I stayed at that hole from 10:30 to about 4:30 and got a picture of every single player that came through. I really enjoy taking pictures (the cameras we have are AWESOME!) but it is still a tedious process. Following the round, the post-round duties are pretty crazy. That night, Kate (our flex-position) wrote the story and posted it online and sent it out to media officials, and I proofed all the scores and posted the agates (rankings from the day) and there were a lot of things in between. As I said before, this week was the first time we were completely on our own so it took awhile to make sure we were doing everything right but some how we made it through! I will give you short updates on what happened the rest of the week and what is going on in Nemacolin soon but for now just take in that long post from today!!! Hopefully I will get to it tomorrow but no guarantees!