Quote from Zielijo1 on July 9, 2023, 3:52 pm

I volunteered as part of the range crew. I did not die in the heat but it did suck. At least I didn’t have to encounter the 3 dogs if ur model went that way.
the worse day was R/C rocket glider. All day, short flying windows, changes to the schedule, and then fly offs in the heat.

more to come but I wanted to share the usa team manager’s message. I was on the time keeper team, Jim was great to work with

Trip comes to red glare, he flies his M motor thumper, mentors TARC teams and was a mentor to a junior usa ( Maddie) who won a gold at the event.

Dear Volunteer –

Thank you for being part of the “other” US team, the one that ran and staffed the 2023 World Spacemodeling Championships.  Without your voluntary contribution of your time and effort and your endurance in the Texas heat this event would not have been a success.  Because of your contribution it was indeed a great success, one that did the US proud and proof that the USA knows how to host and run a top-quality World Championships when we were given this opportunity 31 years after our last one.  88 of you Americans who were not part of the US Team (that would be the “World Champion US Team”!) stepped forward to staff this event, along with about 15 people from other nations and a number of US Team members on their non-flying days.  It took all of these to run this complex week-long operation.  FAI international events are run by detailed procedures that are unfamiliar to almost all of us, so everyone all had a lot to learn to do this exactly the right way.  You learned the procedures and you did it the right way.  No World Championships ever gets every detail right on the first try, but you did it better overall than any of the 8 others I have attended overseas.  Well done!

I’d like to offer a particular shout-out to a few of you who put in exceptionally high levels of effort in key positions, beyond James Duffy (event director) and Mike Nowak (competition director) who together spent the last two years planning then running the overall show.  Jonathan Rains as “event secretary” handled registration of all the teams, range crew, and supporters and their assignment to housing, which turned out to be far more complex than expected and took huge amounts of his time to get done perfectly.  Mark Bundick handled event finances, which involved complex movements of foreign funds from all the teams that only he could have figured out.  And Jim Gearhart organized, trained, and led the 64 people who served as timers during the meet, ensuring that every flying lane had two proficient and properly-equipped timers every minute of every round – an enormous “cat herding under pressure” task that he did really well.

This was a successful, well-run World Championships and you played an important role in making this happen.  The US Team won the distinction at it of becoming the overall World Champion team, which has never happened before.  You can see the competition results and a lot of great photographs of the event on the NAR website here: https://www.nar.org/site/wsmc-2023/results/

Thank you for what you did to make the 2023 World Spacemodeling Championships a success.

Sincerely,

Trip Barber

NAR 4322 L3

US Senior Team Manager & WSMC Volunteer Coordinator