Taylor Whitman
Enterprise, Utah
Accounting
Leadership Engagement Track
Cedar City Racquetball Tournament 2018
My EDGE project ended up as a racquetball league for Cedar City in which those who were interested were able to participate. This was different from the original plan for this project which was to have a full season and league for those interested in Cedar City. This was originally scheduled for the summer of 2018. Despite all the efforts to advertise it to those in Cedar City, there was not enough people that signed up to be able to create a full league. This is where I had to go to my backup plan and schedule just a tournament in the fall when there were more people in Cedar City that could participate. This was met with more success.
In the fall, when the tournament was able to take place, we were able to create a successful tournament. We had those that were interested sign up and they were put into a double elimination tournament that I created. Shortly after we started, we had more interest and individuals who wanted to join. This created a slight setback, but I was able to make an adjustment to the tournament schedule to involve everybody that wanted to participate. We were able to play through the tournament and a winner was crowned.
My inspiration for this project stemmed from my love of sports. I also wanted to use a unique way to learn leadership skills that I would need in my career path of accounting. Instead of learning this in the usual way, I wanted to be able to combine the two aspects of my life in this project. It was also something that would be easy to get others involved. It also would present more opportunities to interact with others with different backgrounds as well.
Some challenges that I faced with this project included advertising. Despite all of my efforts with advertising throughout Cedar City, I was not able to get enough people involved to create the league that I originally envisioned with the project. This required huge adjustments to my project that I had to make. I also faced challenges when others wanted to join the tournament after it had originally started. I had to remake the tournament and schedule to get more people involved. Finally, there were times where not everybody could show up. We were able to schedule substitutes so everybody could still play, but that was a difficult challenge.
This project was able to benefit everybody involved. For those who were just looking to have a bit more exercise, this was able to meet their goal. Others were looking for more competition as they were experienced with racquetball already. They were able to meet new people on their skill level that they could play with as well. So they were able to benefit well beyond the scope of the tournament.
Finally, this project was able to benefit me in many ways as well. This project really taught me how to adapt to hard circumstances. I also was able to improve my communication skills as I had to interact with those in the league. I did this through explaining how the tournament was going to work and answering the questions that were asked of me. My organization skills were also able to improve as I had to organize how the tournament would go and the adjustments that would have to be made.
This project taught me a lot about how important it is to be able to adapt to the circumstance that you are given. Don't give up if things go the way that you want them to.
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