Observations From a 1st Time Volunteer (Oct. 13)
Thursday morning. First day of the “real” part of The McGladrey Classic. Time to perform. I got up at some awful early hour, showered and dressed quietly so as not to wake up the household, and drove to the remote parking area. The shuttle bus was full of volunteers, all dressed in blue shirts and khaki pants. It was dark. I flashed back to taking a similar trip many years ago to Richmond for a pre-induction physical. Four hours to Richmond in a chartered Greyhound bus and it was just getting light when we got there.
When we got off the bus, our first stop was at the volunteer center for a copy of the program for the day and an Egg McMuffin. It was still dark when I set out for the thirteenth fairway, my first duty station, but it wasn’t that hard to find. Mind you, the moon (full only a day before) was still pretty high in the sky and dawn wasn’t even really breaking. The man from ShotLink was still setting up the equipment when I arrived. He looked pressured.
My partner arrived and we introduced ourselves. Since I know fairly little about the game and since he had the binoculars, we agreed that he would identify the players and keep the “grid sheet” and I would laser the balls and enter the data. Pretty straight forward, but I still had some opening-night jitters. Then it was time to wait for the first group.
To make a long story short, we did okay. There were times when we were still trying to figure out which player was which and just getting the ball lasered (I think that’s a word) before they hit again. At one point, “the truck” called on the radio to tell us our hand-held needed to be rebooted. We didn’t even know it wasn’t working. We worked together pretty well, though, which appears to be the key. We shared in spotting where the balls landed, and we shared in trying to figure out who was who. After that, it was just a matter of loading the data into the hand-held.
I didn’t realize how much work this was until after my relief arrived and I was able to leave. I had been standing at our duty station for over five hours. We got to move around (mostly trying to spot balls), but we never sat. There were brief periods when there was a separation between groups of players, but we didn’t rest. We mostly used this time to make sure the grid sheet was correct and to enter the data.
When I was finished, my plan was to go find the place I was scheduled to work the next day, but I discovered that the course was a big place and the second hole was a long way from the thirteenth, so I blew it off and headed back to the volunteer center.
