Notes for my Pack on how I run Pinewood derby for a 100 plus pack 685 pflugerville tx.

I'm trying to put in place some documentation on how I run Pine wood derby for my pack with 100+ kids

This is all going to be pretty specific, I just want the notes to exist... but feel free to look them over.

They are going to start pretty basic and get ore detail as we go along


On the macro level pinewood breaks down to the following parts

Done ahead of time:

• Buying stuff ahead of time:
• Patches, Trophies and Ribbons, Decorations
• Getting the space reserved at the church
• Big room for track, 2nd room for snacks movies and the inspection on the night before derby, Talk to Rudy& Meluinda to get this nailed down early. I be we can just use the big hall where we meet at Immanuel for everything but movies.
• Planning and Recruiting.
• Get team leads from the leaders, get them volunteers, find out what budget they have, and let them goto town.
• Revising the Pinewood Rules if Needed
• Unless we do a rules simplification, this should be done already
• The only rule change we have planned is changing the settings on the race software, to make the rules appear more "fair".

Done on the day(Pick a team lead & assistant to do each of these and get out of their way, answer any questions year)

• Set up Tear down team -  Picks up the track, Sets up and Tears down the track, delivers the track back to storage  - Rudy did great at this
• Software Team - Charlie Hedlin has run this since i started
• Decorations Team
• Snack & movie room team
• Inspection team - Need to do more like 2 years ago, have someone blocking the doors until we are ready (or keep the doors closed) We got bum rushed while setting it up last year . I have all the stuff for this, rules, check-in forms, station notes for the assembly line and all the tools  & supplies.
• Race Ops Team (You ran this last year)
• Cleanup Team

Done after

I always write up a post Mortem doc, while everything is fresh in my mind, of the changes I want to make for next year.

Things you can start on now... or later....

Buying awards -

Patches from the studio (https://www.thestudio.com/) the nice thing about the studio is they will copy any patch you find on the internet... So start googling pine wood derby patches, and looking at pictures to get a feel for what you want... Get the budget from Doc, I got 100 patches because that's a big price break point. we usually have in the 90s of scouts, about 70-80 of which actually show up whole process 2-4 weeks usually (but plan for more)

Trophies and Ribbons, from crown trophy, (http://www.crowntrophy.com/store-122) pick the one you want on the website, contact the Austin office,  order them, drive over to pick up when ready. It can't get much easier than this one. I did this early and put them on the shelf fora month or two, just so it was out of my mind. (whole process, once they got the  ribbons for the new year in, ie 2017) about a month.

Recruiting.  Start picking your team leads & assistants whenever,  for the bulk of recruiting  i start late November. I'll dig up my form form last year and you can use that to know how many to recruit. I try to recruit people of differing ranks for each "on the day" job, so nobody has to work when their kids are racing. I also recruit enough so that when each person is out we have enough to get by...

ve enough to get by...