Scouts West

As to the food, I went through the line at the end. I waited until all had eaten. My food was very warm, close to hot. I had plenty. Meat was tender. Last year my meat was cold and tough as can be. We opted to go with our choice based on many reasons: Price being at the forefront. Three years ago, I barely got enough meat, when I went back, there were trays filled with plenty of meat, I was told, "no seconds!". This year, many went back for more and enjoyed themselves. They we very happy campers.

Tee-shirt sizes seemed off. Something I am dealing with the supplier. Again, getting the shirts late Friday morning due to unforeseen circumstances, and my lack of not being able to take inventory before hand, I am sorry for the mess ups.

Chuck and Ruthie stepped in at 7pm Thursday night and did a great job to help with everything. Many thanks to both of them. Big John selling tickets in great pain, thank you.

For the future: We have a date set; we have the campground set with a 10% discount; and we have a working web-page again. These three factors put 2018 way ahead of the curve compared to years past. We will look into possibly other types of food than BBQ, but until we have a Chair for 2018, it will be hard to have a food chair.

Bottom line: We raised a great amount for a very worthy cause; we got to share IH with others; we saw wildlife; and no one got really hurt. Val is better and that really is one factor worth celebrating. She had a rough weekend, but sounded very good when I spoke with her after the event.

In all, Shaun and Brad worked on taking a pile of prizes and working them into a great raffle, Dave and Val did many hours of getting registration set up so Ruthie was able to go forward; Shannon kept our finances straight; Big John pushed our raffle tickets to a great sum; Little John and Jeremiah stepped up with Dooley leading runs; San Diego made a great breakfast; Bruce played 'driver' to yours truly for my run; Marco got us to hear with his audio expertise; Matt and all those who helped serve, got us fed; and our Co-chairs were a great team.

Our Co-Chairs demonstrated how team work can work. We all owe many thanks to Vic and Arnold. They both did different jobs that needed to be addressed. Arnold spent hours before the event working on getting all the needed paper work in order. Between trying to get things up on line, to having hard copies. He and I had many a late nights getting wrinkles ironed out. Vic ran the camp like a Field General. He brought tons of supplies, kept us hydrated and set the stage for all. His take charge attitude kept our event going forward on a positive note.

Joe Hartman for printing the ScoutsAfield

If I perchance missed saying or acknowledging your efforts, please forgive me. This event has many layers of building blocks and I am sorry if I missed anyone who should be mentioned in setting those blocks upon each other.

I spend most of this event every year with my nose buried in the judging forms, so I will mostly confine my comments to the judging after a brief comment about the food.

I probably got in line to eat after all but a small handful of you. I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that a number of people had seconds before I got to the food. I don't remember it being cold. Maybe not hot, but at least warm. The cake was excellent, I hope to see it again next year. The biggest snafu was with the sauce jars and how we might best get the sauce out of those jars. I don't imagine we will be plagued by that issue again since it is easy to prepare for.

Some of you like the forms. I have been asked on several occasions by people at IHWR from other clubs for copies of our forms so that they might look at how we do things. Many of you, particularly those that have used them, probably hate them at least as much as you like them. Despite Vic's complete confidence in them, they are far from perfect. There are parts of the form I no longer use, point weights that I readjust on every form for every vehicle because I have continued to tune the judging every year. I keep using the old forms, rather than reprinting, because there aren't so many changes I can't remember and we still have lots of left over forms; its cheaper not to reprint every year when I revise.

I was pointedly asked by Tim Potter this year if someone might lose or not lose because something as trivial as a shifter knob that is so worn that its label is no longer readable. Don't Judge Tim, he has a point. Also, he has judged as many stock vehicles with these forms as anyone else, and the stock forms are the longest. He feels the pain of these forms as keenly as any of the judges. The short answer is "Yes." The highest scoring vehicles this year earned in excess of 400 points. We judged some vehicles separated by a score as low as 6 points. On a form where most things are worth between 1 and 3 points, and with scores that high, scores that close would, ideally, not happen at all. If I change a handful of item point weights by 1, the results of that pairing might change. When the judging is done, and I am looking at the scores every year, I ask questions like "Should this vehicle have beaten that vehicle?" I then have to reconcile the answer to that question with other questions like "to what extent do I think these scores truly reflect these vehicles, and have the owners of these vehicles failed to represent the work they have done to them well with the paperwork?"

John Glancy had some thoughts for our judging:
1. He would send us the scoring system he uses at nationals
2. Some of the things we use on our forms do not belong on our forms
3. The system we are using is better than no system at all, and, considering the lack of experience I might have, he is happy we have made some kind of attempt at formalizing the scoring process.
4. We need more judges

He also said something that I do not know has ever been confirmed for our club any year prior: the winner of IHWR's best in show is permitted free entry at nationals, and is entitled to all the benefits that come along with that free entry, including a share of the travel money that event provides for the select entrants that are invited to nationals because they have won at other events. Perhaps our judges from before I began running judging can confirm whether or not this has always been the case.

My hope for next year is that we look at John Glancy's system and do something to adopt it, meld it with our own, or some how reconcile it with ours in light of the courtesy that he has extended to our event.

I asked him a bit about their judging, and my strong suspicion is that if we do use his system as is, we will need to switch from what I would call unskilled judges (not that their legendary efforts are not appreciated, but the skillset used in filling out our current forms does not call for a vast IH background on the part of the judges) back to the die hard IH fans among us who can spot all the factory special options. These are things to consider moving forward and I will have more to say about all this when the board holds its IHWR decompression meeting.