Awards banquets are quite an undertaking for the athletic department. The department wants it to be a memorable experience for the student-athletes and their parents. We recognize those student-athletes who have done extraordinary things, such as maintaining a high grade point average (GPA) while playing a varsity-level sport.
Over the past few weeks, Mark, Roger, Joe, and Emily have been putting together the programs, finalizing awards, researching GPAs, and verifying the status of all the fall student-athletes. Today, I assisted with going over all this information diligently to ensure there were no errors. Once everything had been verified, I began making copies of the program to be distributed that evening. With approximately 270 student-athletes and parents coming to the banquet, Mark requested that there be 300 copies made of the program. I was responsible for making those copies. Each one took about a minute to reproduce, so it was going to be a long day. Not to mention that I went through three different copiers before getting them all done. Due to delays in shipping supplies, parts needed once they expired were on backorder, causing me to find somewhere else to make copies.
After leaving for about an hour and a half, I returned to Clay for the actual banquet. I helped set up the auditorium and tables for student-athletes signing "commitment letters" to their respective universities. I also assisted in escorting the student-athletes on the stage to be recognized and photographed. One of the night's highlights was the fact that we had 99 student-athletes on the stage who were being recognized for receiving their first varsity letter in their respective sport and maintained a GPA of 3.25. Roger had said that is the most he ever remembered being recognized at once.
There usually are many issues that arise during the awards banquet. One problem that we had was during the signing of the "commitment letters," one of the student-athletes sat in the wrong seat. How this happened is beyond me because each student-athlete brought in things from the school they will be attending to have placed in their seating area. One student-athlete signing to attend Baldwin-Wallace had a pennant attached to the table in front of where they were to sit. There were also other knickknack items from the school on the table. How they sat in the wrong seat was mind-boggling. However, they did and took pictures at someone else's seat. The parents complained, and we set the stage for them to re-do the signing. Other than this issue, Mark and Roger were pleased with how things went.