I’ve had a brilliant weekend.
Yesterday I was at the Great Yorkshire Showdown in Leeds NSOing. (A reminder for any non skaters out there, NSO is Non Skating Official, we do time keeping and score keeping etc). I’d put my name forward some months ago and then forgotten about it. I was pleased to be selected as a penalty box timer.
I’ve done this role before at a few informal games, but GYSD was quite a big event. Six teams competed in two groups of three. The winners of each group when through to the final. Because (I imagine) is was WFTDA sanctioned there was paper work! Never had to do that in the past. Fortunately the box manager was a friend and he explained it. I got the hang of it by the end of the day.
I started off using stopwatches, as most do. I wanted to use the app that I wrote a bit ago, but didn’t want to mess things up. After the first game I gave myself a talking to. Who the hell is going to use the app if even I don’t trust it? Eat your own dog food is the rule! So in the second game I did use it, with the stopwatches around my neck as a back up. I was really pleased that I did. It works really well, though the experience highlighted some improvements that I can make.
The penalty box is the place where skaters don’t want to be. As a consequence when they visit they are generally not it high spirits. Most of them seem focussed on the game, a few are cross, either with themselves or with the call. A few though are chatty and jolly. Of note yesterday was Sniper from the Newcastle team. She called in a few times and asked for cakes to be ready for the next time. I also noticed that she was very happy on track.
On track all of the games seemed to be played in good spirit. There were some big hits and the medics were called to track a few times, though thankfully everyone was able to get up and walk off track after a few moments to compose themselves.
I don’t recall the scores. Some of the games were close, a few not so. The final though was amazing. Newcastle were about 50 points behind at half time but won by 1 point!
It was great to see Hulls Angels too. They brought me a HARD t-shirt so I’m one of the family now :-)
Proud to have been involved in such a prestigious, well organised event.