Competition - Day 1

I don't know who won yet, but hundreds of other people probably do know by now.

Tonight was the first night of the Bodybuilder Hubby's bodybuilding competition.  Actually there weren't any bodybuilders on stage tonight.  Tonight was all about the Figure girls.

We had five classes for Figure, four based on height and one, the Masters class, for competitors over age 35. 

There were a lot of things that went really well.  The audience turn-out was fantastic, and there was a lot of energy in the room.  The competitors looked amazing!  The judges certainly had their work cut out for them.

There were some glitches that I'm hoping we'll learn from to prevent in the future.  The show started a little late.  I don't know why yet.  I was busy selling tickets and didn't even realize that the show hadn't started on time.  Hopefully whatever the reason for the late start was is something we can plan for and keep from happening next time.

The only other thing that didn't go according to plan was the Figure classes - the groupings based on height.

We spent a lot of time trying to determine how many classes there would be and what the height cut-offs would be.

We looked at all the applicants we had as of last Sunday, five days before the contest.  Ideally, all of the competitors would have registered by then.  Or at least most of them.

We list out everyone by height, and then look for ways to group them so that each class ends up being about the same size.  So the height divisions are different every year depending on how many competitors there are and on their heights.

So this year it made sense to have four groups:
6 people - 5 ft 1 inch and shorter (Class A)
9 people - 5 ft 2 to 5 ft 4 inches (Class B)
8 people - 5 ft 5 inches (Class C)
10 people - 5 ft 6 inches and taller (Class D)

We try not to have more than 10 people in a group because the more people you add, the harder the judging gets and the longer the competitors have to stand on stage.

We thought this would work well, expect then we ended up with several late applicants, most of whom, for some reason, were tall, so Class D got bigger.

Then today at registration, all of the competitors are measured for height, and three of them from Class C were a different height than they had put on their application and had to be moved.  So Class B ended up having twice as many people as Class C, which I'm sure feels really unfair to the competitors, but which we were just sort of stuck with for tonight.

We have, however, already talked about ways to prevent the same thing from happening again at the next contest.

Tomorrow will be a long day: Bodybuilders, Bikini competitors and Pro classes.  74 competitors, I think.  Judging in the morning and awards in the evening.

I left tonight before the awards were announced to take care of some things for tomorrow.  I'm looking forward to hearing how the scores turned out.  

And I'm planning on having the results, including the judges scores, posted on the contest website by Sunday evening.

Good luck, tomorrow's competitors, and Congratulations to today's!