By Breven Honda

As the calendar flips from February to March, hibernation is officially over as a brand-new spring season kicks off for the Mesquite Senior Games. 

Because of how long it has been, whether it was a couple months ago for the winter bowling event, a few months ago from the fall season, or even from last year’s spring games, the participants are ready to begin the new season.

A handful of players are even anxiously waiting for their event to come around.

“Some of them can’t wait, and they try to get us to do it more than once a year,” Mesquite Senior Games President Sandy Tudor said on Feb. 23. “”

Between March and April, 15 different sports and activities are on the docket for this year’s spring season.

The season begins on March 8 with table tennis and concludes with the Tennis Senior Challenge on April 21-25.

In the early part of the season schedule, the bowling event is completely full, and the golf tournament is open for the last couple of spots as of Feb. 23. 

Golf had been completely full before two people had to drop out.

For any event, if players have to drop out for any reason, the Mesquite Senior Games will do their best to refund as much as they can. The only thing part that is non-refundable is the $5 fee for Fusesport, the online registration platform.

A couple of events that Tudor would like to see more people sign up for are the less competitive sports in the history tour and the fitness hike. Although the Mesquite Senior Games receives many walk-up attendees, signing up for these events helps.

It is more important for the history tour because Desert Gold Realty provides sack lunches. So by signing up, the Mesquite Senior Games has a better idea of who is coming, rather than having to guess on the number of walk up participants.

One sport that Tudor could have more participation in is with the track and field at the end of the month.

As of late February, there are people signed up to participate in 75 events.

Tudor said it is not necessarily 75 people participating because there will be people that take part in multiple events.

“(Some) runners will run in three or four different events,” Tudor said. “We have 19 people participating in 76 events. And that’s pretty common. We’d like to have about 25.”

One of the unforeseen situations for track and field is that there will not be a javelin field event this year. This was due to the recent renovations that were made to the turf at Virgin Valley High School.

Tudor said these situations arise as there cannot be an infinite number of logistical capabilities.

“Virgin Valley High School redid all their fields, and they did them in turf. They don’t want us throwing Javelin in their turf. I think there were four people, and this happened early, because we had a meeting with the track coach. 

“Those are the things we have to look at. ‘What limitations do we have on the venues? Like bowling, we can only have 88 bowlers because we only have 22 lanes, and we always reserve one of them.’” 

The bowling event at the Virgin River is separated across two days this spring rather than having to get everything done in one. So, the doubles session is on the 15th and the singles session follows the next day.

Tudor said the bowlers had positive reactions to split up the days in order to have the maximum amount of quality play.

“They’re happy because it was too much for them to try to bowl six games in one day,” Tudor said. “So, they’re very pleased that we made it a two-day event. And the bowling alley is being very accommodating because obviously they have to close down their open bowling when we have the lanes.”

Another logistical change comes with pickleball as Lori Andus and Deni Fraken-Duff come in as new event directors. Andus and Fraken-Duff enter with experience, running the pickleball tournament at Sun City.

Sports director Shawn Edwards was the event director for pickleball before Andus and Fraken Duff stepped up.

Now it gets something off Edwards’ plate as he can worry about his other duties, which include being the Sports Director while also continuing to work on the new website.

Tudor said adding Andus and Fraken also provide a bigger understanding of running a pickleball event.

“They’re more accustomed to running the event than we were individually,” she said. “Shawn’s really good at organizing things, but we needed somebody who was more in tune to a pickleball tournament running it. So, Lori and Jenny are just doing an awesome job.”

So far, there are 19 people participating in two days’ worth of pickleball.

As Tudor and the Mesquite Senior Games are looking for more people to participate, the organization is also looking to find volunteers.

Beth Caplinger, who is the volunteer coordinator, uses a platform to organize the help that is needed for an event.

“She puts in the parameters of what we need, sends it out to all of the volunteers and then they check which ones they want to participate in, or which ones they want to volunteer at, and what times they want to volunteer,” Tudor said. “So, it gives her a complete breakdown of how many people are going to be at registration. Registration is a short volunteer time. It’s like less than an hour generally. So a lot of the people who will volunteer to do registration will also stay and do score keeping after that.”