It’s been 5 years.
It started with 28 teams in 5 courts in Wickenburg High School and its neighbor across the ravine, Vulture Peak Middle School.
As you drive into the driveway of the high school, you can see the round monolith that is the top of Vulture Peak, a challenging hike into the Wickenburg desert that offers a grandiose 360 degree view for those that can scale its 3,660 feet.
This year, the “wooden” anniversary of the Challenge, it became even more obvious why this tournament has been so successful.
How successful? This year, 112 teams played in four divisions on 19 courts in three different cities and 5 different gyms; a 75% growth in just 5 years.
There’s a lot of conjecture as to why this tournament has taken off as it has. It offers teams that aren’t playing in the Region’s National Club Qualifier a chance to play in a close and inexpensive two day tournament. It gives a free t shirt to all athletes and coaches. It awards medals to first and second place in each age division.
But it’s more than that…
Seeing the potential growth, the Wickenburg school district rebuilt a two court gym at Hassayampa Elementary school two years ago giving the city 2 more courts of play. As was told to the Region, the district needed to do this but the Vulture Peak Challenge was the impetus behind the build.
Early on, the restaurants in Wickenburg would close at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturdays. A Region phone call would ask some to stay open till 9 or 10 p.m. to accommodate those teams playing late so Denny's wasn't the only dinner option. They put on staff, kept their doors open and worked with us gladly.
The host hotel sets aside rooms for our teams and staff and officials. We have sold out their hotel the last 5 years. The economic bump the city of Wickenburg gets from the tournament is palpable.
As the tournament started, some of the courts were missing flip score charts. Scrambling, all the sites got them except Hassayampa. They were short one. No problem said the Wickenburg Athletic Director Bill Moran. He set up the electronic scoreboard even though, as he admitted, he had no idea how it worked, but as he said, echoing the City and School District’s cooperation with the tournament, “We’ll figure it out.” They did, crisis averted.
This year, a snafu with rooms had two officials out in the cold (well, chill). The manager of the hotel came down at 9:30 p.m. and solved the problem. There wasn’t an “I can’t help you” in her vocabulary.
For 3 team ties, the tournament’s footprint is a “Queen of the Court tournament” making the players settle their place on the court instead of games and points. While it didn’t happen this year, it’s an exciting and unique part of the Vulture Peak Challenge.
In Prescott, the Yavapai College team officiated the matches as part of a fund raising push for their program. With Region officials mixing in, they plowed through the schedule. The players all took an extra three hours out of their busy college schedules to get some extra officiating training from two National Officials that live in Prescott.
Region officials who sign on for this tournament accept a pay cut in order to keep the tournament fees low and often work all day with snippets of breaks to stay hydrated and fed in between matches.
The office staff formats, bundles t shirts, handles teams that drop the day before the tournament and do all this while STILL running one of the more crucial tournaments on the Region’s Junior Girl schedule the same weekend.
And what about the athletes themselves?
How about Jessica with the Desert Valley 14’s team that called her own touch late in a close game: her coach smiling and beaming, proud of his player.
And how about Ashley from Arrowhead’s 14-SWAT team who, wanting to play more, offered herself up to the Desert Stars Flagstaff team who was missing their 6th player because her mother had delivered a baby the night before. Ashley stepped in, donned the Flagstaff jersey and played middle with them all day so they wouldn’t be forfeited and the 5 girls having wasted a 2 hour drive that morning.
As the 14 Gold medal match started, two teams from Tucson were scheduled to officiate. The site directors, staff and the clean-up crew stepped in and reffed the last match giving both Tucson teams an hour head start on their drive home.
If this was an OFFICIAL Region tournament, a lot of what happens in the Vulture Peak Challenge wouldn’t fly. But this is what we call a “fun” tournament. It’s somewhat sad that ALL of our tournaments can’t be called “fun” but because certain rules are enforced a little more loosely, and the objective is to get teams to play and have a good experience, it’s a bat signal to the volleyball community and they respond.
Most of you won’t ever host a tournament let alone one of this size that shows no inkling of getting smaller anytime soon. But this is a collective effort: people giving up time and money, solving problems instead of finding ways to avoid them: parents and coaches and athletes and officials working together for the greater good.
One parent that left Wickenburg high school after her daughter’s final match asked her husband, “Why can’t all the tournaments be like this?”
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