This is the email you have been expecting (dreading?) since I announced that we will be hosting Individual All Stars back in the spring: I need your help!

Volunteers - If you are available on Friday, July 31 or Saturday, August 1, and are willing to provide some of your time, there are several jobs listed on this Sign-Up Genius form–most notably:

• Friday: The pool will be closed the entire day and starting at 3 pm, we need approximately 15 people to help us set up the pool grounds. This will include moving away lawn chairs, roping off areas, placing signs, putting up tents and the like. We will try to use your time as efficiently as possible but we also will need you to hang around as we work out final logistics with the league.
• Saturday: The NVSL will provide many volunteers to help run the meet but we are responsible for most of the roles “outside the ropes”–e.g. managing parking and spectator flow. We are fortunate that we do not need to manage concessions as our snack bar staff will be handling that. At this stage, I am asking that you just sign up for a general role either helping with parking, marshaling, or hospitality. We will assign you a specific role when you arrive, but you can take comfort that it will not require any training and will mostly involve being flexible and helping out.
• Saturday afternoon: The meet will end around 2:30 pm and then we will need as much help as we can to get the pool ready for normal operations on Sunday.

Not on the list, but I am also in need of one or two people to provide special assistance on Sunday and Monday. I am heading out of town on Sunday but we have a few items that vendors will be picking up from the pool (portajohns, tables, chairs, bleachers) and I want to have a local contact in case anything comes up those days. This is not on the Sign-Up Genius but if you can help, please reach out to me individually.

If you, or anyone you know, can help out these days, please sign up for a role (or two or three)! We will keep you fed and well hydrated, and we even have some special shirts for those who come forward first or provide the most help. If you have high schoolers who need service hours, we can also accommodate roles for them. Plus, there are some tasks I need to do before that Friday so feel free to reach out if you just really love helping.

Supplies - There are a few items that I am hoping to crowdsource rather than rent or purchase. If you have any of the items below that you can lend to the pool for the weekend, please fill out this google form so I can keep track of everything.

• Tents: We need as many 10x10 area tents of the type that you see us use during swim meets that we can get.
• Changing tents: We could use one or two single-person changing tents that you sometimes see at swim meets as the clubhouse bathrooms will be closed to swimmers and spectators.
• Turf carpets: We will have a lot of barefoot swimmers walking around the parking lot and other potentially hot surfaces, so it may be nice to have some turf carpets or similar durable ground coverings.
• Old towels: If you have old towels that you don’t want, we will have a lot of wires running along the pool deck that we need to cover.
• Miscellaneous: If you have been to an All Star Relays or Individual All Stars meet, you may have an idea of the environment that we need to set up. If you have any items that you think may be useful to us, I put a space on the sheet to describe what you can offer.

Thanks for reading this far. I truly appreciate all of the help that you have provided this season and know it is a lot to ask for even more of your time and effort. Hopefully, it is somewhat fulfilling to know that all this work helps make Vienna Woods the best pool in the NVSL. And if it is not, hopefully the tshirt and food are somewhat enticing.