Monday - January 05, 2009

Being League Secretary Sucks

I haven’t posted too much in the way of bowling blogging lately. Been too busy with other stuff.

Well, it’s a mix of good news and bad news. Which is typical.

The good news is that my Monday night team did really well in the position round we had last week. We took all 7 points but it wasn’t easy. We won the first game by over 100 and then we won the second game by about 50. But then the other team woke up and started bowling well, while our team got tired and began rolling poorly. It was neck and neck the whole game, and then we seemed to drop the ball [hur hur, bowling pun] in the 10th frame of the 3rd game. So when it came time for me, the anchor, to roll, we were down by 26. I had a spare in the 9th. Ron, the anchor on the other team, is pretty good. I expected him to go XXX or at least XX-something. Instead he rolled X 7 0, and that was on an open in the 9th. That gave us a small window. My first ball was a strike, which gave us 20 because of my earlier mark. So we’re still down 6. My second ball was a 9, and that was enough. I missed the spare, but it didn’t matter. We won that one by 3, and thus took all 7 points. That moved us up several positions in the standings, so now we’re in 9th place out of 18 teams as we go into the 2nd rotation. This is a very competitive league, but we still have fun. I don’t know if there will be a “Miss Congeniality” prize, but my team will win that if there is. We have such a good time, so nobody gets grumpy when we beat them. Conversely, we don’t get down (too much) when we lose. This is not always the case with some teams!

The bad news concerns my Saturday Night league. While my team is solidly in 1st place there, the league itself is struggling to survive. We lost a lot of teams this year, and have been barely surviving with 5 and a half teams. How can you have half a team? Well, the half team started out as a whole team, but nobody showed up. We didn’t find out until later that all the members had quit the league, at least for this season. Nice of them to tell me this when I went to all the effort of finding out their phone numbers and calling them up. (all our league’s records were lost at the end of last season, so everything had to be rebuilt from the beginning. As Secretary, all of this was my job and my job alone. Great!) Then the alley found us 2 guys who said they’d take over that team. They came for a couple weeks then stopped showing up. Did they call and say, Hey, sorry, we can’t make it anymore? Heck no. They just evaporated. So I had to figure out how to figure in forfeits, which required bending some rules. After 4 weeks of no show, I had to just about force our league president to admit that these guys were gone, which made that team the BYE team. Ok, fine. More work for me, but at least it’s settled. The bowling alley doesn’t like to lose money by having BYE teams - they are an empty slot which brings in no cash - so they told me they found some guy who wanted to join a league, and he had a whole team of friends to bowl with him. Hey, great, come on down!

So the first week the new guy shows up. And nobody else. Uh oh. Here we go again. The second week he shows up. By himself. And then spends an hour on the phone, forfeiting the first game, trying to get his buddies to show up. At last one of them does. His girlfriend. So now we have 2 on that team, but at least one M one W as we are a mixed league after all. So they forfeit one game and bowl 2. This is a difficult thing to enter into the bowling score software, so things got screwed up in the database and I didn’t notice. This last week they both came, hurray!!, and both bowled the full series. Hurray twice! And they paid their money and their sanction fees. Hurray to the third! But the software was really messed up. I spent more than 3 hours today going into the database, going back several weeks, changing scores, rosters, averages, total pins bowled, etc., until I finally got it figured and straightened out. So now everything is perfect, and my hope is that none of the whiners on this league will notice. Which means I’d better get the old standings sheet taken down tonight and put the new one up. But the thing is finally correct, so I’m happy.

Being League Secretary is a lot of work under ordinary circumstances. But when your league is “dynamic” it’s a huge pain in the posterior. And nobody will ever know just how much work it is unless they do it themselves.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/05/2009 at 03:57 PM   
Filed Under: • Bowling Blogging •  
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