Cold and windy

[Andy]

I worked a large ASA JO FP tournament in Las Vegas this past weekend.

Unseasonably cold for Vegas this time of year - between 25 - 50 degrees both days, but the worst part was the wind...anywhere between 10 - 40 mph - made it feel much colder.

I live in the desert, so I don't have a lot of cold weather gear, but I wore everything I had...pretty miserable to work in that kind of weather.

I ended up having to facilitate the ejection of a coach over warming of bats, of all things. Teams were observed early in the tournament keeping all of their bats near the portable heaters in the dugouts early in the tournament and were told not to do that. In my last game of the tournament on Sunday evening, I oserved one player standing in front of the heater with her bat and turning the bat in front of the heating element. She immediately ran right out on deck with the bat, then up to bat. I was the BU, so I told my partner what I saw and we enforced the altered bat rule since we had already issued enough "warnings" to this team and all of the teams regarding this issue. The resulting out was the third out of the inning, so the coach comes out from the dugout with all of the standard lines...."these are composite bats, they have to be kept warm or they will break!"..."You need to show me where in the rules it says you can't warm the bats!"..."I'm never coming back to this tournament again!"...blah...blah..blah....

We let him go for a bit, then I am escorting him back to his dugout, telling him that he has had his say, it's time to play ball. We get back to the dugout and I turn to go to my position and he yells at me to "shut my mouth!", so I inform him that he has chosen to leave....big stink as he leaves yelling at the UIC and anybody else that will listen.....not a good ending to a fun tournament despite the weather....Oh well......