As Tim mentioned in his Round 3 announcement, the Steering Committee voted
at the February meeting to go back to 8 run groups for the remainder of 2006
Regular Season.
Emotion and an over-reaction to our first two event turnouts of 2006 (with 6
rungroups) won out over a realistic look at our turnout numbers over the
last year and what it takes to staff an event (30-32 workers per rungroup,
meaning BEST CASE we need a turnout of 180 for 6 run groups and 240 for 8
run groups). This is to fill all of our positions per rungroup :
* 21 course workers (7 stations, with a flagger, radio and
ONE cone chaser per station...consider this the MINIMUM
per station to SAFELY do the job)
* Announcer
* Scorer
* Cone Counter
* Barcode Scanner / Radio
* Grid
* Starter
* Timing Slips
* Safety Steward
* Gate Waiver
* Tech (2 per morning run group, zero per afternoon)
* Registration (2 per morning run group, zero per afternoon)
(Note that it was actually one more worker per shift under the old card
system, so the switch to the new computerized system will help us on that
one)
We also are fortunate to have folks who come in for setup in the morning so
we can get the event started on time, so that is an extra 10 or so that we
lose from our worker pool during the event.
Given our turnout numbers from last year
http://www.sfrscca.org/solo2/Results/2005/
Even going "down" to 230 turnout, we only had enough turnout to staff 8 run
groups in the IDEAL world of evenly split rungroups in 6 out of 13 local
points regular season events in 2005.
Your patience and support at events is appreciated, and thanks in advance
for those that will volunteer for second (and third) work shifts to fill out
the understaffed work groups that will arise as the year goes on.
For those running when we are understaffed, I thank you for your patience as
you wait for the event chairs to find volunteers before we can start a run
group.
As the ones who made the decision, I fully expect that the Steering Commitee
members will be among the most enthusiastic of volunteers for the extra
shifts necessary to keep our events running.
Ed Runnion
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