How do I help my area move to districts?

[Mr V]

Originally Posted by ehochstein

Could you share with us how you handle the movement of fields throughout the season? Do you rent a semi truck each week or do you have some means of transportation donated?

We use a 53' semi trailer. For our first two seasons the use of a shipping container and trailer was donated via a parent of a student participant who works for a shipping company that just so happens to do a lot of their business shipping to AK, that means that during the winter they have lots and lots of containers and trailers that are unused. They also arranged to connect us with owner/operators to two said trailers which the PNW district payed for.

For some reason this year he was not able to make that happen so we went for plan B. Plan B was to rent traditional 53' trailers we were able to get a good deal because of an Alumni who now owns a company that does stage lighting and AV production and has connections and accounts that allow him to get a good price. I'm not sure if he arranged the truck or not this season.

Note we seem to be unique in using this approach. One of the reasons that we do it this way is that we own all the production equipment, we don't rent things like pipe and drape or sanctions and we do all of our own AV. So we manage to fill that 53' trailer to within a couple of feet from the end, and that is with many cases double stacked. The trailers come back to our Fieldhouse between events where they are partially unloaded to restock the consumables and occasionally do some repairs.

I know that some other areas use PODS. The PODS are delivered to the warehouse that accepts the shipments from FIRST where they are packed for the current season's game, then the company picks them up and transports them to the venues. I don't know what they do about consumables, whether they pack it all from the begining like FIRST does with their trucks, whether they are transported by volunteers, or if the PODS are returned to a central location for restock. PODS then stores the fields during the off-season.

The trailers work for us because we have the Fieldhouse where everything is stored in the off season and much of that equipment like floor coverings, pipe and drape, power cord protectors and AV is used for FLL and FTC events. The Fields are also used for off season events, they have been used for both the OR and WA Girl's Generation events, Comicon in Salt Lake, the AZ state CMP and Chezy Champs. So it is nice to have it all at our facility for the common carrier of the user's choice to pickup at our loading dock.