Sportsfest Opened Early

Our 2011 sportsfest officially opened last March 25 at the Amoranto Sports Center in A. Roces Ave., Quezon City.  The schedule was somewhat unexpected to mainly due to three things.  First, it was held together with our quarterly General Assembly.  Second, that it was held before April.  And lastly, it was a whole day Friday event.

The event started with our 2nd GA of the year.  Unlike our previous one held last January, this one was less workshop and more about recognizing our people and their distinctive achievements during the first quarter.  These include major sales of A.O. Smith's residential and commercial heat pumps, a mall-sized chilled water air conditioning system, wave ball wave generator, swimming pool water treadmill, and diesel-run Aurora fire pump.  The GA was short and, true to management's fears, a little overshadowed by the subsequent sports fest.

The festivities started ala-Olympics with Mr. Gogo Espinosa running around the gym and lighting the torch.  After a brief confusion on what to do with the torch, Gogo lead the oath of sportsmanship.  Then, it was the team and muse parades.  Kelly represented Admin/Sales, and Glodys stood for Thermovar.  Service 1 Team stole Len from the Admin group, while Service 2 had Otep's daughter.


The Thermovar group's fiercely competitive spirit was visible early on, with their classy Adidas yellow and black uniforms.  Admin/Sales displayed a more fun-fun spirit, with their Amici Blue uniforms, along with dorky blue balloon hats and accessories made the previous day.  They even got to share more balloon hats of different colors to the Service teams.

The sports fest games started with two fun games, courtesy of Jheng and Gay.  The first game was a crazily tiring for a fun game.  Five randomly selected players on each team played a sack relay race.  The twist is that instead of switching players on each loop, the players already jumping had to fetch team members one by one.  In effect, the first player had to go round 5 times, and the second player 4 times.

The second game was a best-of-3 eggplant and matchbox game.  An eggplant was tied with a rope on the player's waist to hang so that it didn't touch the floor.  The player's goal was to get the matchbox on the floor to reach a finish line by swinging the eggplant.  Ryan handily won the first round, but Pando squeaked past Ryan the second round.  On the last round, it looked like a close game, until Pando managed to move his matchbox in the opposite direction.

After the fun games, we had women's and men's volleyball game.  The service groups refrained from joining the women's game.  For the women's volleyball, Thermovar handily won the game.  For the men's volleyball, Thermovar won 2 to 1 against the Admin/Sales team.  Between the Service groups, Team 1 got the best of Team 2.

After the volleyball came the much anticipated opening basketball games.  Game 1 was between Service Team 1 and Admin/Sales.  During the first half, it was a close game despite Service Team 1 leading pretty much.  However, the second half became a rally point for the Admin/Sales from which Service Team 1 just never recovered.  Admin/Sales concentrated on tighter defense in the paint and on the point guard, which lead to steals, turnovers, better defensive rebounds, lots of fast breaks, and ultimately a blow out.

Game 2 was a fierce battle between Thermovar and Service Team 2.  While Service Team 2 had the tallest players around, Thermovar had avid fans of NBA, which translated to high basketball IQ.  The highly competitive Thermovar also had the loudest cheerers.  (That had its own disadvantage: it made third parties cheer for the unsupported underdogs.)  For most of the game, Service Team 2 struggled without a point guard.  Thermovar, on the other hand, played consistently throughout the game. 

The fourth quarter proved a different story.  Service Team 2 gained momentum early fourth quarter to close in on the game and made for a tense last-2-minute seesaw game, and overtime.  During overtime, Service Team 2 gained fresh legs when a personnel returned just in time from a service job.  They went on to finally notch the back-from-behind win.

Admin/Sales: 1 - 0
Thermovar: 0 - 1
Service 1: 0 - 1
Service 2: 1 - 0

After basketball, Ms. Celna from HR announced the winners for best muse and costume.  Glodys of Thermovar was the best muse, while the Admin/Sales team won best costume.

It was a whole day event.  The first shots have been fired.  We got back to our office at 5:30pm.  But people are already looking forward to the succeeding games.