Southwest Regionals schedule now online

[Laura]

Hi everyone! The "timeline" schedule for Southwest Regionals is now online at the USA Dance/NorCal web site. You can take a look by visiting

http://www.usabda-norcal.org/regionals/schedule.html

See you at the competition!

Laura La Gassa
Secretary, USA Dance/NorCal

[pygmalion]

Wow, Laura! Great job. You've obviously done a lot of work to get to thois point -- you have the schedule down to five to eight minute intervals. So I assume the times correspond to actual entries. It takes lots and lots of work to coordinate something like that.

Good luck with the event. :D

[Laura]

You would be amazed...handling entries and scheduling events has been a full time job for the past two weeks. There were many iterations of me printing out the program and chopping it up into events and rounds and arranging them on my dining room table. And then re-arranging them. And then every so often a late entry would arrive and since it didn't add a heat or round I'd add them in, and that would sometimes create round or costume conflicts that would make me have to re-arrange things some more.

This was the first time I've set a schedule on my own, and I learned a *LOT* about setting up a competition from this.

This one-day all-amateur competition has:

-- 149 couples
-- from 18 states
-- dancing 408 entries

The next large competition we are doing is in November, it will be the 2nd edition of the California State DanceSport Championships. I'm looking forward to it because I hope it will be at least as big as this Regionals while at the same time being even better scheduled because I'll have more experience. And then, after that, are the 2006 Nationals. This will be a three-day event. I am pretty sure I won't be the person handling the scheduling, though...I think it would be too big a job for me at this point.

[pygmalion]

Yeah. Your page looks deceptively simple, but it represents a heck of a lot of work.

Any chance of you harvesting work/learning from this go round when you organize your next comp?

[Laura]

Oh definitely. It should get a little easier every time.