During the last weekend in April, the Colorado Mesa University (CMU) athletic department has what they call the crazy weekend.
From Friday to Sunday, CMU hosted 13 games and the RMAC track and field championships. Like the Maverick teams in action, the athletic department also showed out.
To start, the athletic department had to ensure there was proper event staff at each event. The department was able to spread their staff across all the events, including four different locations at the same time on Friday, while administrators were back and forth between the locations as needed.
“The first thing is trusting your staff, and trusting your colleagues,” association athletic director Oscar Ramirez said. “We have a tremendous event staff. I don’t like to take credit for anything, I just say we all work together. It takes a village to be successful.”
While there was enough event staff at each location, higher-leverage positions such as track and field volunteers, photographers and live statisticians were still needed. To solve that, the athletic department reached out to former students and professionals in the business.
“Calling in personal favors, a little bit of that. Just trying to get good people in the right spots using those connections that we’ve built up over the years,” sports information assistance Chris Day said.
Assistant Athletic Director of Communications, Dave Jahnke and Day were also in charge of live streams for each event. According to NCAA rules, each event must have a live stream in accordance with the live stats.
For softball, a volunteer kept live statistics for the series against the Colorado State University-Pueblo.
Despite the spread out staff, lead producer of Maverick TV on the RMAC network Gypsy Fischer was able to broadcast all the games smoothly. Fischer and her student producers ran the streams with multiple camera angles and commentators at each event. Students were charged with not only operating broadcast equipment and student volunteers were commentating the weekend’s match-ups.
Another challenging task the department faced was hosting officials. Each event needs NCAA sanctioned officials, and it’s CMU’s responsibility to house them over their stay. For that, CMU gives officials sponsored hotels, this time, doing so for five different sets of officials.
Even with several events going on at the same time, everything ran perfect.
“Our staff is very good at thinking of problems ahead of time. We had several meetings with everyone involved. For me, when we’re busy like this, it’s tough, but we’re winning,” Ramirez said.
In typical Maverick fashion, with all the events going on, there was a lot of winning. Mesa won 11 of the 12 games they played in, and had program record performances in track and field.
This was the first time in school history CMU hosted the RMAC track and field championships. With the help of over 60 volunteers, the Mavs had a great showing.
The men’s team, led by a high-jumping sweep, scored the most points in program history, en route to a second place finish. Meanwhile, the women’s team, led by a balanced team effort, grabbed their first second-place finish in program history.
The other RMAC postseason event CMU hosted was the RMAC men’s lacrosse tournament on Friday and Saturday. Two games were played Friday, and Saturday was the championship game, seeing the Mavericks three-peat.
Also on the lacrosse field, the women’s lacrosse team played their final two home games of the season. On Friday morning, the team grabbed a 19-10 win, and continued the win-streak with a 11-4 win on senior day on Sunday.
Even more on Friday, the softball team started their final home regular season series. The Mavs swept their double-header on Friday and Saturday, making them the outright regular season RMAC champs, allowing them to play host of the post-season tournament. However, they were knocked out of the tournament before the championship game the following weekend.
Finally, on Friday night the baseball team began their final regular season series, with the fireworks game, at Suplizio field. After the fireworks win, the team won the series 3-1 with games on Saturday and Sunday. After a win the following weekend, the team finished first outright in the conference, and will host the RMAC tournament this weekend.
While the weekend was extremely busy for the athletic department, the fact that CMU went 11-1 and hosted two RMAC championship events, makes the weekend worth it.
“Winning is fun. Our institution is invested into our athletic success. It shows on the field, we have a great group of student athletes and coaches across the board who put in the work as well. It’s our job as managers to put them in the right position to do it,” Day said.
