By Breven Honda
The Mesquite Senior Games has a new president.
Sort of. 
In late September, Interim President Sandy Tudor has taken the role of president for the club.
She said there is not much change, having been the interim president for the last year.
“I really don’t find any difference,” Tudor said. “I learned that there’s a lot more to this job than you think. Especially since we’re not replacing the executive directors, simply just dispersed all the roles and responsibilities of the executive director.”
Since become the president, Tudor has not officially announced the goals she has for her presidency, primarily because she is the event director for the men’s softball event, which begins on Oct. 6.
Tudor has been putting the final preparations for the event, including sending out bracket information, volunteer material and the logistics surrounding the 11-day tournament.
“Most of our volunteers work in probably a three- or four-hour shifts,” Tudor said. “So, when we have softball going from eight in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon, it takes at least two shifts.
“We’ll get the brackets done for the 50-55s, which are not until the following week, the 16th and 17th of October. I’ve got the umpire’ lined up. I got rooms for them. It’s a lot.”
One new thing for the volunteers is that the Mesquite Senior Games has been rewarded with a grant from the Nevada Volunteers and Americorps organization “to reward our volunteers with some ‘swag’ and provide them with the recognition they so richly deserve.”
Some of the swag includes new brand apparel, water bottles, reusable toted, duffel bag as a thank you to the board members and volunteers for their time and effort.
While overseeing the new grant and the merchandise that has rolled in, Tudor has also needed to focus on the five people who joined the board about six months ago due the discontinuation of the executive director role.
As a result, this transition from being the interim president to president has been a lot easier because of the knowledge and proactiveness the new board members have already taken.
“We had some swag gifts for our volunteers, and we had to put decals on them,” Tudor said. “I mentioned that I picked up the decals and I picked them up. It was a little more difficult to take off the backing than I was expecting but I sent (the board members) an email and said they’re here and we’ll get together and put them on.
“One of the board members sent an email saying they’re done. They put all 100 of them on and now we’re ready to pass those out when they get the clothing ready. So, people are just really stepping up and doing whatever needs to be done.”
Not only are the other new board members a bright spot in the coordination of the Mesquite Senior, but so are the volunteers, who are preparing for two other events this month.
There will be a couple of two multi-day events. First, on Oct. 23-24, there will be a bocce tournament and from Oct. 25-27, there will be pickleball.
“They’re critical,” Tudor said of the many volunteers who help.” We can’t put on an event without volunteers. The board members alone are not enough. We’ll have people in the snack bar at the softball games at Pioneer Park. We will also have some Mesquite Senior Games merchandise available for sale and that generally takes at least two people to handle that.
“For bocce and pickleball, every individual who comes to play in those sports has to register. Pickleball is a little more complicated because we have to go through pickleballbrackets.com, which is the National pickleball site, needing three people registering athletes. And then we do the scorekeeping. It takes 10 to 15 volunteers to run any event.
The registration deadline for the pickleball event is Oct. 11 and the deadline to participate in the bocce event is Oct. 16.
