No Bag and Tag Inspection at Championship

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by ChuckDickerson

Just curious, do you have specific suggestions as to what might be feasible to remove from the inspection checklist? I would be fine with the B.O.M. disappearing but what else might anyone have in mind that would speed the up the inspection process? Everyone wants to get teams as many matches as possible with the least amount of stress placed on the volunteer base.

Chuck - A few weeks ago we had a small problem here at the North Star regional you may have heard of - our field didn't show up until 11:50PM Wednesday night! Wednesday evening, not knowing if the field would even show up at all, we came up with a backup plan that involved crossing the street and working everything for 123 teams on the 10,000 Lakes field. That would have meant qualification matches starting at noon on Thursday instead of Friday morning, and a need to get through inspections for all 123 teams in 4 hours with only 23 inspectors. So, Al and I came up with a modified inspection checklist, designed to be completed in 15-20 minutes by a normal regional inspector (aka not an LRI or one of the very experienced inspectors we have at champs - those folks can perform a thorough full inspection in 20 minutes if they have to!).

Essentially, we started by removing everything that wasn't safety based. We then did some simplification of each section. In the end, our entire modified checklist came out to be one side of a single page.

Fortunately, the field showed up, we had an amazing team drive in to help set it up (they weren't even competing that weekend!), and we could keep the entire event on track like normal. That might have been the first time a team not competing at a regional legitimately won an award.