Guest post written by Colin Good
Friday May 2, 2014 was the second annual Faculty and Staff Sports Day at UBC’s Okanagan campus.
Though our desks were littered with paperwork and ringing telephones, we happy few from Enrolment Services chose to leave that all behind for a few hours and join with the campus community for some food and fun. Together we formed “Enrolled to Win”, an all-star team consisting of athletes Andrea Burke, Jennifer Eberle, Maggie O’Neill, Ashley Stapleton and myself. We proudly wore the UBC yellow and blue for our team colours, bright as the sun and clear as the sky above.
Our first order of business was eating lunch. Then we began tackling the events, starting first with the inflatable obstacle course. That was great fun, each of us climbing, sliding, charging and tumbling through in short order with no regard for safety or dignity. This was particularly illustrated by Maggie who emerged to land face-first onto the grass. We clearly were not the swiftest egg and spoon carrying runners nor the most perceptive at the memory room, only scoring 5 out of a possible 10. You could say that I “dropped the ball” at the water balloon toss, earning a big fat zero instead of valuable points.
Undiscouraged, at every station we gave it our best and successfully compensated for individual losses by using our cohesion as a team to our advantage. We made great strides at the 3 legged race and earned bonus points completing the scavenger hunt event.
Our combined dancing talents served us nicely, earning a Zumba score of 9/10. Dizziness didn’t stop us from hitting balls out of the park and we’d literally dwarfed the competition by constructing the tallest spaghetti tower over all. It measured one full metre in height before the wind toppled it.
Despite the setbacks we’d suffered along the way, we had fun and our team performed very well. We racked up a lot of points compared to other departments, placing 3rd overall out of 20 teams. No trophies or medals were awarded for third place, only recognition so we will have to return next year to claim first prize.
“This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, this is just perhaps the end of the beginning.” – Winston Churchill