Philo Case

For my leadership project I partnered with Lauren van Leerzem. In the beginning we planned on having a basketball camp with our proposal being such, "We are planning to organize and run a basketball skill development clinic for elementary students grade 6 to 8. The purpose of this project will to promote Lancer Basketball as well as to help assist the students from our feeder schools the fundamentals of basketball so they are prepared once they begin high school sports. This will also assist our school's future sports teams in the sense that our athletes will already know the basics and will have more time practicing more advanced things of the game. We plan on holding this clinic from Monday to Thursday of the first week of January. We estimate that we will put in anywhere from 20 to 30 hours in preparation, the actual camp and cleanup. All money that is earned from this camp will go into the Basketball program." Christmas break did not work out in the end due to gym time conflicts and the fact that many people were going on vacation during the break, so we did not get many sign ups.

After we realized that this would no longer work we brainstormed and remembered that the junior girls volleyball team holds a Lancer Invitational Tournament each year. We then approached Mrs. Gould and asked if we could 'take over the reigns'. Although Mrs. Gould had already finished some stuff such as inviting teams and booking gym time, there was still much for us to do. We had to set up the tournament schedule and were confronted with some difficulties. A month before the tournament a team dropped out and we were now down to 9 teams, an odd number that made the scheduling extra difficult. We also had to contact the teams to confirm with them that they would be attending, and ask if they wanted to purchase team pizza. After we had all the information we went on to order the pizza for the teams, officials, volunteers and food booth. We also organized a schedule of duties for the volunteers.

The day of the tournament, Friday January 8, finally came and we felt prepared but were nervous for what the day would throw at us. We spent most of the afternoon organizing for the food booth and putting directional and tournament posters around the school. Teams started to arrive at 2 and the gyms were already set up for them to warm up for the 2:30 game start. As 2:30 was drawing closer we realized that only 2 of the 3 officials had shown. Thankfully, Mr. McAuley stepped in to official the first game as the late official didn't show until the warmup before the second game.

The night seemed to run pretty smoothly except for a couple of volunteers that just didn't show. This was not a huge deal because we had made sure we had extra people just in case, this only meant some people had to scorekeep by themselves. At the end of the day there were a list of things that we thought we could improve on for the future. First