Homeschool athletics day

You might remember that back in November I mentioned that we were planning a homeschool athletics day.

Well, we had it on Wednesday.  And it went really well.

As I said before, I was sort-of in charge of organising it (alongside Sandra at HASCA).  And I must admit that in the days leading up to it I was a little worried about the expected number of kids attending, as well as the expected number of parents helping out.

The thing is, homeschoolers are not so great at reliably committing to something.  Or communicating their commitment.  One never really knows how many homeschoolers will turn up until halfway through that event.  There are always last-minute issues.  A "yes" is a maybe.  Silence is a maybe.

We really wanted a decent number of kids, so that everyone would have someone their own age to compete with.  I was hoping for over 100 children, and in the end we got about 90.  In some age groups we had several kids (eg we had nine 11-year-old boys), while in other age groups we had much fewer.

We also needed a decent number of adults helping out, so that we could run six events at the same time and the kids could rotate around and do all the main events.  I'd worked out that we'd need about 25 volunteer helpers, and right up until the Wednesday morning we'd only been able to get about 15 solid commitments.  So, I'd had to plan an alternative event programme that relied on fewer volunteer helpers, running fewer events simultaneously.

But just before we started we got enough parents stepping forward and we ran the full event programme.  For what it's worth, this is the programme we ran:

	Track		Games	Discus	Shot Put	High Jump	Long Jump
9:30am Start	30m	4-		13	12	10	11
	60m	5
		6
		7	4-	9	8	14+	7
		8	5
		9	6
	100m	10		10	14+	12	13
		11
		12
		13		7	11	9	8
		14+
	400m	10
		11
		12
		13
		14+
Lunch
	100m	5		12	13	11	10
		6
		7
		8		14+	7	8	9
		9	4-
	200m	10	5
		11	6	11	10	13	12
		12
		13
		14+		8	9		14+
		7
		8
		9
	800m	Open
3pm Finish

It all went so well that we are planning to do it again next year.  Hopefully the word will get around the homeschooling community that this is a fun yearly event, and we'll get even more kids next year.

(Meanwhile, we are starting to think about the homeschool swimming day.  We've booked the pools for Wednesday 20 March.  Now all we need is an experienced swimmer to step forward and organise things.)