Community Olympics

The Community Olympics have come and gone.  I've had a little while to reflect on the events and results from this year and I have to say, I have been surprising happy.  If you haven't heard of Community Olympics then there can only be two reasons:  One, you don't live near Kearney or two you live under a rock and haven't seen the sunshine in eons.

The 17th Annual Community Olympics were June 22-24 and consisted of quite a variety of events ranging from volleyball and track to kayaking and horseshoes.  This year was a record year for participation with 879 people making up 32 teams!  Needless to say, that's a lot of competition.

With so many people this year, and with a variety of sports and activities that we didn't feel we would score points in, we decided it would be a great year to just enjoy the games.  After all, it was only our second year of participating, and we like to be competitive, but overall if we're not having fun then what's the point?

To create a fun atmosphere for our team we tried to be creative with our team name.  We had several suggestions and then put it to a vote.  In the end the winner was Toucan Sam & the Fruitloop Posse.  Little did we know it would actually work our quite well for us to create a few fun ideas from the name!

Last year we had a relatively small team - less than 20 people and we finished about the middle of the pack - somewhere around 12th place as a team (if I remember right).  We had a lot of fun, but we did so many events we were all tired and sore on the final day of events - which made it a little less enjoyable at that point.  This year was much different though, we had nearly a full team and that made a big difference in the amount of time we had to 'recover' between events.

We had a few exciting moments where we scored points we didn't expect.  Our women's obstacle course team managed to qualify for the finals and placed 3rd.  Then the men's team took home gold medals on the first night - that was pretty cool since we also won the obstacle course last year.  This year we had a completely different team in the competition and they had a smoking fast time!  A few other events we won were team kayaking and sidewalk chalk.

We had some impressive third place finishes in coed horseshoes, the trivia contest, and scotch doubles bowling.  Those were all events we weren't sure what could happen, but we were all happy to see strong finishes!  We also won our dodgeball match against the eventual winners of the overall Community Olympics - nice work everyone!

Overall we finished in 5th place.  That was a big surprise for our team, but we were happy to see our hard work paid off as well as it did.  We were only 40 points behind the champions, so the top teams were all VERY close.  On top of finishing in 5th place, our team was chosen for the team spirit award.  I have a feeling our fruitloop necklaces might have helped us out!

I'm already looking forward to next year!

Until again
-=Nolan=-