Trial and Not Too Many Errors: Reflections of a New Steward
By Lady Gwen verch David
This February, I ran my first event as head steward – a low-key picnic lunch-and-tourney afternoon event to celebrate Valentine’s Day. (Well, it started low-key; by the time the event began we had eighty attendees and the Crown.) This wasn’t my first experience with event management, or even on a stewarding team – my training began with the birthday parties of my siblings, continued with organising A&S classes and a couple of choir concerts during uni, and since then I’ve been a deputy steward for a newcomer’s event and co-steward for a tourney and feast. So I wasn’t starting from scratch…but I wouldn’t call myself experienced, either.
When I started planning the event with my feast steward, I had some general principles in mind:
- Delegate as much as possible, to a broad range of people
- Make the majority of activities something people could drop in and out of, and accessible to as many people as possible
- Leave room to adapt to surprises
These all worked out pretty well for me, and I’m going to keep using them. Some examples of how they worked in practice:
Delegation
- For a five-hour afternoon event, I had the following team:
- A feast steward with two assistants
- A bookings officer and someone running Gate
- An infrastructure deputy (more on that below), who recruited a helper and the Baronial Chandler
- An event marshal (focused on rapier), with two assistants who ran armoured combat
- Someone running an A&S activity aimed primarily at children (while I set up a fairly self-starting A&S activity aimed primarily at adults)
To sum up, an eighty-person event had a core team of six, and a total team of thirteen essential helpers (fourteen if you include the Hospitaller, who coordinated with newcomers to arrange gear for them). For those who are mathematically inclined, that works out to more than 15% of attendees being part of the team. And it was great! A couple of times during the event, people came up to me and said “Is there anything I can help with?” And I looked around, and could honestly answer, “Check if the water jugs need refilling when you go by the serving area, but otherwise, we’re good.”
Infrastructure Deputy is a role that I’m going to bring with me to every event I run from now on. It was amazing. A week before the event, I told Vidarr: “Here are the things we need to borrow from the Barony”. And when set-up began, they turned up. I told him: “I want a shaded serving area over there, a shaded A&S area over there, a list field in the middle that the marshal is happy with, and areas for the pointy hats and populace to sit”. And they happened. At the end of the event, he took charge again, and the borrowed equipment was packed down and into vehicles without me needing to manage a thing. I have absolute confidence that in a week or two, it will all have returned to Baronial storage without me having to do anything further about it.
And that’s a big lesson to carry into the future as well: pick deputies you can trust to be competent, then let them be. Communicate your goals clearly, and trust them. Because truly, there is no greater joy than telling someone “Make it so” and knowing that they will.
During the event, I was called on several times to make decisions like “what will we charge people attending off-board?” and “what time are we serving things?” and “are we ready for Court yet?”. But thanks to my abundance of amazing deputies, I was mostly responding to moments of particular uncertainty, not managing every step.
One final note on the long-term impact of delegation: large stewarding teams drawn from outside your immediate friendship group help spread stewarding experience throughout the SCA community. Each person you recruit to help you is someone who will be more experienced the next time an event comes up, and someone who can share that knowledge with others. If you reach out beyond your household and the people who always take on certain tasks, the knowledge spreads even further.
Integrated Asynchronous Activities
Our event was bookended with an opening court, a rapier melee, and at the other end, an armoured melee and a closing court. In between, everything happened at once, and was designed so people could switch from one to another at will.
Simultaneously, we had rapier and armoured challenge tourneys (i.e. find someone you want to fight and join the queue), flower-crown-making, heraldic biscuit-decorating, a buffet of food available to graze as people chose, and a populace rose exchange (more on that later).
People could spend five minutes doing one thing, then move to something else for a while, then sit down and chat with friends, at whatever pace suited them best.
Having parallel drop-in activities like this meant that: fighters could fight without missing out on everything else; people could eat when they were hungry; parents could take time-out from activities to child-wrangle without missing things; and generally, everything felt fairly low-stress.
To help this happen, we served the food in two batches – not a first course and a second course so much as a replenishing of the buffet. If people wanted to eat early in the day, they could. If people wanted to eat later – after fighting, for example – they could do that too.
We also worked on the principle that activities should be open to as diverse a group of participants as possible. Our heraldic biscuit-decorating was aimed at children – but adults were welcome, and enjoyed it as well. Our flower-crown-making was aimed at adults – but children were welcome, and one nine-month-old spent some time happily playing in the basket of fake flowers. Both activities required little experience, knowledge, or skill to enjoy, and took relatively little time to do one ‘unit’. I wandered away from my flower crown and back to it several times, but still finished it in well under an hour. These sorts of activities mean that children, adults, newcomers, old hands, and people of varied abilities can all participate together as part of the same community. It’s low-stress, and it’s fun!
Our populace rose exchange was based on the same idea. A Rose Tourney is a wonderful expression of chivalry, courtesy, and appreciation of others, and I have always found it my favourite type of tourney to watch. But as a non-combatant, I am restricted to the role of recipient – and it is proverbially good to give as well as receive. In our rose exchange, the price of a rose was not prowess on the field, but wordfame: tell the Baroness of a person worthy of admiration and praise, and receive a rose to bestow upon them. Over the course of the event, more than a hundred roses were given, by children, adults, newcomers, and old hands alike. (This also had the side effect of encouraging people to approach the pointy hats and talk to them, which is always good.)
Adaptability
Considering that myself and my feast steward were both fairly inexperienced, we knew we weren’t going to be able to predict and plan for everything that could happen. Someday, perhaps, we will have been involved in enough events that we won’t get surprised anymore…but that day is not today. So instead of trying to plan for everything, we made plans that had room in them to adapt to changing circumstances.
We wanted to run an outdoor event. But this summer was full of extreme weather events, and even an ordinary summer can have uncomfortably hot or unpleasantly wet days. So we chose to book a cheap hall in a park, something that would give us a back-up option (as well as kitchen and bathroom facilities), and worked out what weather conditions would warrant moving things indoors. In the end, we did run the event outside…but considering we had thunderstorms and downpours the day before, the option was reassuring, and the kitchen was definitely useful.
When planning our budget, we suspected that we could probably cover our expenses with a $15 gate fee…just. But we knew that there would be some non-paying attendees (children, as well as pointy hats and ourselves), and we weren’t completely sure about our expenses, and frankly, we wanted some room for error. We charged $20 per person for adult members, giving us a $10 per person food budget and $2.30 per person for miscellaneous event supplies, and we were able to finish the event with a reasonably substantial profit.
To minimise the risk of kitchen mishaps leaving people unfed, the food was all designed to be pre-prepared the day before the event, and only reheated and served at the venue. This turned out to be useful – like in many kitchens, there were some issues getting the oven and stove to cooperate. Having an approximate schedule for the second serving meant that I didn’t even realise there had been mishaps and delays until I dropped by the kitchen to check in.
We closed bookings on a Monday night when the event was on Sunday, even though we could have let them go later. It gave us extra time to plan for the final numbers – which we ended up needing, because we went from expecting forty attendees on the Sunday before to expecting seventy-two when bookings closed, and there were several last-minute additions. I was astonished and somewhat intimidated to see so much enthusiasm for the event, but most people I mentioned the jump in numbers to commented that a large number of last-minute bookings is normal. Don’t rely on them if your event is struggling, but be prepared for them. (One thing I wish I’d done in retrospect was work out an upper limit of what our event could support.)
Our marshal, too, adopted the principle of adaptability. We planned to begin the event with a melee spectacle based on sheep-stealing tourneys, and most of the parameters had been worked out in advance, but some were decided on the spot, in consultation with combatants. (For example, as we had an uneven number, one combatant was chosen to fight for neither team, but instead to cause entertaining chaos on the field.) The heavy fighting version of the melee needed some additional changes, due to the difficulty of heavy fighters getting a hand free to pick up the stuffed bee the teams were competing over. Sir Ysambart’s suggestion of having a fighter set aside their weapons to serve as a human ‘bee’ was inspired, and brought great amusement to people on and off the field.
Our schedule was approximate, and we didn’t hold ourselves to it strictly. The event opened at 12:30; we allowed half an hour for attendees to arrive, sign-in, and get settled before Opening Court. This was about as much time as most people needed – although Court was delayed a further fifteen minutes because the Crown had initially gone to a different scout hall up the road. Because we were planning for things to happen in sequence (court, then melee, then tournament) rather than to a schedule (court at 1pm, melee at 1:15, tournament at 1:30), this was something we could adapt to without stressing about it.
One of the important lessons I learned from this event is that the right time to end an event is before people leave. It sounds obvious, I know, but it’s easy to get too attached to your plan to acknowledge that people are ready to go home. We planned to run from 12:30-5:30, but by 4:00, the fighters had mostly cleared the field, and a few people had left early. We arranged to move Court to 4:30, and it finished at 5pm. What followed was the most astonishingly efficient pack-up I’ve ever seen. At five o’clock, the park held five shade tents, a large list field, fifteen banners in portable holes, half a dozen tables, dozens of chairs, groundcloths, and of course, attendee’s personal things. By five thirty, the park was bare. By six o’clock, the kitchen was packed away and clean, and we were bumping out. This relied, of course, on the willingness of attendees to help – but I do genuinely believe that part of that willingness was pack-up beginning when they still had energy to do so.
Concluding Thoughts
I’ve written a great deal above about different things that contributed to the success of my event, in the hopes that concrete examples are useful to those of you planning to run your own. But it’s also a lot of text, so here’s the short version. What did I learn from running an event?
- Recruit a large, diverse team of helpers, and trust them to do their jobs
- An Infrastructure Deputy (managing collecting gear from the group, set up, pack up, and returning gear to where it lives) is a fantastic idea
- Parallel drop-in activities that are suited to a wide range of people make your event more accessible and less stressful for you and your attendees
- Given the choice between one gate price that is just enough and another five dollars that gives you more than you need…just charge the extra five
- Booking numbers may jump substantially in the last 24 hours before bookings close, so close bookings early enough that you can adapt your plans to those final numbers
- Include half an hour at the beginning of your event for people to arrive before any of the activities start
- Approximate schedules based on a sequence of activities rather than strict time-slots allow you to adapt smoothly to mishaps and delays
- If you start bringing the event to its conclusion when people are starting to leave, you’ll have a much bigger team to help with pack-up
And finally…
- There is no better day of the year to hold a Rose Tourney than two days after Valentine’s Day.
Gwen verch David is a frequent teacher, competition-entrant, former editor of Cockatrice and now a steward. More of her work can be found at www.rookwell.com/gwen