I think I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears mentioning again. I LOVE the company that I work for.

We have a dodgeball court.

This past weekend, we held our first annual charity dodgeball tournament. It was awesome.

Since I was gone two weekends ago, I couldn’t volunteer for the event, but I was able to get there this weekend. It was a lot of fun and I got my serious dodgeball ref whistle on.

My company co-sponsored the event with a local sports radio station and we ran it and hosted it in our official “dodgeball arena”. We had 56 teams participating, over 450 players, and we raised over $10,000 for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and the Union Broadcasting Foundation, which benefits local Kansas City charities.

The outpouring of support was fantastic. What surprised me was how so many people are completely into dodgeball. And they were seriously competitive. We had two “almost-fights” that had to be “almost-broken-up”. And I’ll tell you something else…being a dodgeball referee is freaking TOUGH. Too many things going on at once. We had 5 referees watching the game at once and there were still calls that were contested. Players wouldn’t leave the court unless we told them to.

But for the winners (the Klown Punchers), it paid off. They received:

• $1,000 cash
• Entry into the National Dodgeball Championship in Schaumburg, IL
• 8 free tickets on Southwest Airlines, and
• 8 Richard Petty Driving Experiences from the Kansas Speedway

Not a bad prize. And a great tournament. We are probably going to start planning for next year’s tournament a lot sooner.

Good times.