The 'Shroom:Issue 114/Anton's Awards Reflections

Anton's Awards Reflections by To start out brief, the awards this year went very smoothly! Sure, there certainly were some bumps and still are, but something as big as this will never be 5000% perfect and whatever issues we ran into were able to be overcome with relative ease. Like, I'm finding it hard to really say what went well because it was just like....nearly everything?? I didn't have a stroke this year and I consider that a massive success! Everything went by-the-books and we achieved what we set out to achieve.

Everything going fine doesn't mean there's room for improvement, though. Some issues we faced this year were a series of low activity that I really feel are things we just couldn't avoid or were the fault of the community or Awards Ceremony. This community suffered the tragic loss of Walkazo earlier in the year and I could feel the impact it had on morale and enthusiasm going into awards events like tournaments and presentations. In addition to that, a lot of people in the community are in a transient stage in their lives. People are going to college, busy with work, focusing on moving plans (me included!), and that can really take away from hunkering down and spending an afternoon on the perfect reply to an awards committee meeting, or getting a chunk of a presentation done, etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, it's just a fact of life and a thing we must face without losing steam and considering it a defeat. With these we found that it was very difficult to get people to fill all of the presentation slots. Edo and Meta Knight are absolute heroes in this as they took on a large number of presentations to ensure we didn't have any blank spots with just a listing of the results.

Something I learned this year, which is also a consideration for future teams, is that we just simply don't have the resources for an event as large and wild as our imaginations, and trying to achieve that and then strive to make it "better" each year by increasing the load tenfold is just a setup for disappointment and failure. We've reached a peak and I think it's time to plateau; be happy with what we've got and just keep it going. This isn't to say that in the future there's no chance we can do more, but it's just saying to try to keep our heads above water. In the past this would be considered blasphemy, but I would recommend to next year's AC that if the events need to be dialed back to be wrangled back into control, then that is an honorable path to take. There is no harm in going from 65 awards to 60, so long as it's done tastefully and intelligently, with thought put into why and how it is accomplished. Stay grounded. Additionally, have back-up plans for when things don't go right. Like, right now tournament stuff is super late, but some plans like simply decreasing the window of prize selection from 48 hours to 36 or 24 will gain us some lost ground.

Thanks again to everyone in the AC and who did presentations, as well as Edo, 22, Turb, and Pidgey for being there with me chugging along with all of the heavy lifting!