Manitoba Winter Games

I'm back from the Manitoba Winter Games, and was it ever a great experience. I don't know if I can get everything I want to touch on in one post, but let's see how we fare.

The Games are a huge undertaking; until attending I didn't realize how big. There were approximately 1400 athletes participating in the Games, though all were not present at once; the Games are divided into two phases, so there were about 7-800 athletes present at a time. Over 1000 volunteers gave of their time and energy to run the games, and they did a fantastic job.

I was part of the Team Interlake contingent as Mission Staff for the badminton team. Basically, I handled all of the non-sport logistics stuff so the coaches and managers could focus on the sport stuff. It's actually extremely similar to being support staff at BCBC.

We had a team of 16 badminton players, and man, did we ever have a great group of kids. Well behaved, level headed, and for the most part really there to compete. Other than one kid I never had any worries about what the badminton players were up to.

Team Interlake finished fourth in the overall medal standings (Eastman beat us out by 1!), but second in gold medals. I think that's a great result for our region, considering all the advantages the Winnipeg teams have.

I don't want this post to get too long, so I'll probably do a couple of posts over the week detailing different aspects of my Games experience.