So in PLP one of the projects we work on is a competition called Destination Imagination (DI for short). In the competition they have different stages you can get to. You start at Regionals, then you can move onto Provincials, then you can go to Globals. This post is on the second competition in that list, Provincials. You can read my post for Regionals here.

For Provincials we keep the same challenge category so my group is doing the challenge called “Project Outreach”. We have to find some community issue and help solve it, whether it be something huge or small. At the competition we have to present our solution in the form of a fable.

At Regionals our project failed due to trying to take on a community outreach project that was way too challenging for the time and resources we had available. For provincials my group had to make some serious changes, better known as restarting with a completely different project. We had to come up with a whole new issue to begin with. We started thinking and since all of us are athletic and play lots of sports we decided to do something sports related. One of the first ideas that came up was hosting a ultimate frisbee league or tournament to try and build up a little known sport and reach out a bit more to not as athletic people playing sports. Unfortunately after doing some research we found that there was already something like that in our area. We then thought about stuff to do with baseball as both me and one other group member are big baseball fans. While brainstorming about stuff for baseball in our local area we came up with trying to find a solution to the constantly growing lip on the seycove diamond at Myrtle Park.

After asking questions to some executive members at Mount Seymour Little League about field maintenance, we came up with the idea of creating a tutorial video on doing field prep correctly and not messing up the field. We planned out what the video was going to look like and how we could change our story to fit a baseball theme. We also came up with the idea of making a model baseball field with half of it having a bad lip for our impact prop at the presentation.

We filmed the video at Myrtle Park on MSLL fields day. We went through each step of field prep and filmed it, making sure anything really important was highlighted. After filming we got all the video on to my iPad so that I could edit it. Our original plan for the video was going to have the MSLL Fields Manager do the narration for each step. However after we started talking with him we knew it wouldn’t really work as he was definetly a bit camera shy. So we used subtitles to describe what you had to do in each step.

Also as a part of this challenge we had to have a project briefing with at least 3 people. I have played at MSLL since I was 4 and spend a lot of my time volunteering there, so I know the Executive members really well. I was able to get the President, Registrar, Secretary, and Player Agent to come and discuss what we had done. This went really well as they all liked the video and gave us a bit of feedback on some minor changes we could make. The video is now posted on the MSLL website and they got a big response to it on their social media.

Unfortunately I was not at the competition for provincials as the date clashed with MSLL Opening Day. As one of the most experienced umpires I had been assigned to umpire 2 games on that day. I was also part of the Opening Ceremonies carrying out the baseball provincial banner that my team won last year. Our team did well without me though. We came in first place for our team challenge and our instant challenge (although I guess I have to admit that we were the only entry in our age group for the Project Outreach Challenge). I guess in theory this means we could head off to DI Globals in Knoxville Tenesee – but I’m happy to say that we our ending our DI journey here as all of our group have too many other commitments.