ISK Mini World Cup

The Mini World Cup has a deceptive name, the tournament was the biggest ISK has ever been a part of. It is a football tournament for schools and teams all over Kenya with categories of U7, U9, and U11. These refer to the age groups of the kids that participate. The event included over 30 teams and was one of the biggest football tournaments in Nairobi on the basis of number of games palyed. The name “Mini” comes from the size of the players. With so many teams needing to know where they had to be a t what time, what field they were playing on, who they were playing against, etc. There were some volunteer high school students helping out, I was one. The tournament was all day Saturday 4^th of February, and Sunday 5^th of February. I stayed for the duration of both days doing various jobs. I was in charge of coordinating the U11 teams on the upper field. This involved telling teams where to be and at what times, telling referees where to be, collecting scores, sending scores to the head table, making announcements, scouting the matches to award “player of the tournament” awards, posting scores, sorting out age discrepancies and birth certificates among teams and other small jobs and errands to run. It was a very busy couple of days that involved a lot of running around and was quite stressful at times. The main objective of us helpers was to make sure the games ran smoothly, and limit time delays so that the day stayed on schedule. I learnt a lot from this experience. I was responsible for many different things in the tournament and many coaches came to me with questions and concerns that I could easily assist with. I helped a lot of the coordination of the tournament so this gave me many responsibilities. I learnt how to deal with complaints from the coaches in a constructive way and handle situations of coaches blaming each other of unfairness and cheating. It gave me vital experience in acting quickly in pressure situations and dealing with many tasks given to me simultaneously. It was great fun to be involved in the tournament, because of the many life skills it helped me develop, including people skills that I had to use to help lost people, or explain things to. It was fun to be a vital part of such a huge event.