Whoa Nellie! I did NOT see that coming!
This past weekend was the annual NorCal District NYI All-Nighter. I’ve taken the responsibility of planning this event for the past two years and I’ll be the first to admit that it is a lot of work! Planning and making sure that you are within a certain budget while still having a great event is no simple task and not for the faint of heart.
See any fool can plan a fun event that costs a ton of money. It takes a master (much like myself) to plan an event on the cheap that is still AH-Mazing!
I kid, I kid! I’ve been having fun with this because this event went off in the most incredible way! While planning for it I was telling vendors that we were expecting somewhere around 150-175 participants (that’s code for 200 if you’ve ever planned an event). And at that point I was really excited because in my mind I thought, “Wow, we haven’t had this kind of response for a while now. This event will be super neat-o.”
Then the event actually happened…
And large trucks, vans, cars and buses started to dump students all over our host church in San Jose (thank you again Cambrian Park). As they started to arrive I knew that we were going to have an incredible turn-out. Periodically, I checked the registration table and made sure that I knew how our numbers were progressing. I knew that there were more people than we had registered but our number of registered people was high… like 208 high!
We went with that number and took off to the first event. We purchased 208 arm bands and quickly discovered that those would not be enough. I had to go get pizza (which is an entire story in itself) so I never did hear how many participants we had. Off to the second venue our reported number had risen because more folk had joined the party. While we were at the ice skating rink we had a great time but soon it was time to move on to the final venue.
It was at a bowling alley that we were in for the surprise of our lives. The bowling alley required a sign in from each participant that walked through the door. And being the good leader that I am I worked hard to get our participants into an orderly and calm line. Naturally, I was the last one through the door and my only question was, “How many do we have?” The response was slightly abstract since I didn’t have a frame of reference of how many names were on each sheet of paper. The response was, “I’ve got ten sheets of paper.” Now you can take that how you will, but ten sheets of paper with name on it seems like a big number.
You want to know how many names were on each sheet?
30
We had over T.H.R.E.E.H.U.N.D.R.E.D participants at the All-Nighter.
The final count was 320! And that, my friends is CRAZY!!!
Last year was one of the largest turnouts for a district All-Nighter in a while and we had maybe… MAYBE 150 participants.
Anyhow it turned out to be a great night and it could be a great point of traction for fellowship in our area. But as any good farmer with a bumper crop knows, don’t get too excited about big numbers because they might not last! But enough of that kind of talk…
Woohoo! Awesome!