"Good Luck" Beijing Tournament

Things came together at the last minute to make the first games of the "Good Luck" Beijing Olympic test event become successful. A lot of the credit in getting the work done included some key people such as ...Erik Frey and Budgie Clark from the states as well as the many, many, many etc...volunteers.  Also thanks to the contractor Mr Chai and the owners representative Gabriel for all of the long hours of work in dealing with my poor chinglish.  Obviously we have a lot of details to complete but the main issue is that we pulled together as a team to achieve success.  Tournament wise China has started off with 2 wins ...and shares the lead with Japan.  This sets up a game tonight where china plays japan for the first time in the tournament.  Jim Lefebre (Coach of the Nationals Chinese Team) told me that China has never beat Japan in baseball.  Not knowing the culture very well I was unaware of china's dis like of the Japanese.  Kind of a Yankee /Red Sox thing...

Pregame drills of maintenance and the training was short and sweet.  We are still working out the kinks but we were even successful in doing the village people song "YMCA" during the 5Th inning.  Most of the volunteers are students from the Beijing Institute.  A handful speak English making the communication a bit tough but the smiles are plentiful.  The games are pretty much sold out.  It appears that there are a lot of seats not sold behind home plate but that is due to the VIP/Reserved seats by the organizing committee and the IOC.

The coaches and players have been very complementary of the field conditions which has been nice to hear considering how far we have come.  Its hard to believe less than 2 months ago we had fields with partial grass and we were considering the options of moving the tournament to a later date.  To get a better look scroll to the bottom of th blog and look at the photos.  WOW!!!

Our big test starts tonight when we have the first night with both stadiums opening and operating at the same time.  We have been fortunate that the schedule has allowed us to work the fields with a pretty big number of volunteers.  The motto of the 2008 olympics is "One world-one dream".  This operation has been more like "one world- one team." 

Looking forward to the big game tonight!