Under the Radar...

Saturday ended the 25^th season of Arizona Region volleyball with the Open Division and the 12’s battling across town from each other.

As a parent or a coach, you will look at this and smile, your team or your daughter (or both!) hopefully enjoying her experience, and you as well.

What you probably didn’t notice this season is what it took to get your daughters registered, insured for practices and matches, giving them venues to play and making sure there was proper supervision at the tournaments including site directors and officials.

You didn’t notice this probably because the three people who are responsible for this monumental task are stealth, flying under the radar at their own behest. The Region doesn’t call attention to itself, it just professionally goes about its business day to day.

Lisa is the Region registrar. She has handled 9,350 registrations this season with one phone, one desk and not a lot of help. She answers Parent questions, takes complaints when coaches and parents don’t read the instructions put before them and makes sure all the teams in the Region: Junior AND Adult teams, are good to go for their National tournament experiences.

Steve is the tournament director. Over the past 5 months, he has gathered gyms, tried to make sure no teams have to drive more than 4 hours in a day, tried to put teams that are hosting tournaments at those sites, updated results every week and posted those tournaments as early on Monday morning as he can. He doesn’t complain when a gym falls through on Monday morning, or when a team calls him Thursday night to say they aren’t playing and he has to reformat that pool, he just does his job. By season’s end, Steve is responsible for 5,797 matches played in our Region just this season. That doesn’t count the side tournaments such as Vulture Peak, Fiesta, Sol Survivor, etc. Oh by the way, Steve also coaches a team.

Becky is the glue that holds it all together. She makes sure everyone, including officials, sites and site directors are paid. She is the conduit between the office, the161 Junior and Adult clubs in the Region and USA Volleyball. She goes to National meetings and is relied on heavily for her organization skills and helps with everything above as well. No doubt you have at one time or another talked or e mailed with Becky. She is quiet, unassuming and keeps the Region moving forward every day.

You would think these folks would take a collective sigh and a week off after the last five months, but next week, USA Volleyball’s Open Nationals are invading downtown Phoenix and the office is responsible to help with much of this 700 team adult tournament. There is no rest for the weary.

Like you, they have good days and bad. They have family issues and crisis arise but they go about their business, their days in the office with professionalism and a smile.

Our apologies if you find this a bit self aggrandizing for the Arizona Region but they are unaware this was being written about them. If the readership of this blog, (numbering in the double digits soon we hope…) now has a clearer understanding of what they do day in and day out, then this blog was successful because you will never hear it from them.

It’s very quiet under the radar.