A Week of Thanks

Can you believe that it’s already here? I can’t. It feels like the season just started but now we’re only a few days before the biggest weekend of our season. I know that you’re focused on your kids and getting them ready for the weekend but I want to take a second to talk to you about something equally important. While the competition is important, I’ve been a youth educator long enough to know that winning a show isn’t what our performers will remember as adults. Talking to former students, they talk about the bus ride, the friends, the directors who encouraged them, and the seemingly unimportant things that happen in a normal season.

That is one of the reasons that I hope that we won’t make championships week only about competition. Making this a week of thanks is equally important.

You don’t know many of their names but Denise, Jeffrey, Nate, Cassie, and Mindy are the people who calculate the scores and get your judges’ commentary from their recorder to a CD or MP3. This isn’t an easy task and at every show, something doesn’t work perfectly and it is their cool heads under pressure that allow you to never know that something went wrong. Denise, for example, meets me during the week in the parking lot of the Dayton Mall to pick up checks and judges’ sheets for every show. We always joke about making “the drop.” If you stop by one of the tabulations tables, say thanks to these hard working people. I’ve told them many times that it’s the least known yet most important job at any show.

Virgil and Warren, our sound engineers. They’ve been around for years and it’s so nice to know that the sound systems are taken care of. This is a hard, physical job because it includes moving the MEPA floor from place to place. These are two more people to thank.

Without these people, MEPA couldn’t function. These people are so easy to forget and are rarely acknowledged for the hard work that they do. As we begin our championship week, don’t forget to acknowledge those who make all of this happen.