Saturday October, 23, 2010 – Vestal
This Special Olympics event was a bowling event for individuals of 22 years of age and older. Teams from within the Southern Tier Region competed. Frank Padolecchia, Tom Burke and I made the trip down to Midway Lanes in Vestal. We were greeted by John Crosby who has been running this event for many years now. Anyways he was happy to have us and dubbed us the “Cortland Crew.” He gave us the run down of what we were to for the day starting with registration and for the second part of the day following registration. Other volunteers were mostly college aged students as well coming from Binghamton University which is only right down the street.
As teams showed up together sporting their team shirts the ally started to fill up. Many of the competitors were ready to start on up. Even though athletes came with their teams, it was still an individual event. Lanes were divided up by age and athletes competed against their own sex. As soon as we got our lane assignments we set up the score sheet, plugged the names in on the screen and then began bowling! I had a lane of males and a lane of females in the 40 + age bracket. There were a couple of particularly good bowlers in my lane, one of which had a high streak of 4 strikes in a row. After the beginning commotion earlier in the day, recording scores was smooth sailing. Also we just had to keep the order of the athletes for scoring purposes. Two games were played with a brief intermission in-between. During the games there was a lot of down time as athletes awaited their turn so we were just conversing about sports, what was happening in the news. The competitors could really carry out a conversation. After the last frame I tallied up the scores and submitted my sheet to John who then presented the athletes with their award based on how they did in competition.
This was overall a good experience for me. I got to see how this event compared to the previous event I did (Fall Games). It was definitely smaller but still a good amount of athletes for a regional competition. I added 7 more volunteer hours making my total tally 15. Another added bonus was that we all got Special Olympics shirts as a token of appreciation. I will wear it proudly!
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