2010 Is Upon Us!

It was 20 years ago this month that the first ever Firefighter Combat Challenge was held at the University of Maryland’s Fire Rescue Institute in College Park. WTOP, the local CBS affiliate covered the event and the five municipalities that fielded teams. The winning time: 3:40!: posted by Lloyd Jackson of Prince William (VA) County. Just about everyone who participated has retired. Fire Chief magazine devoted a four page story and several full page color shots. The news piece was the springboard for DuPont to step up and fund our first national tour in 1992. FETN covered our World Challenge I the next year in Anaheim, CA, coincidental with the IAFC’s annual meeting. It’s sometime hard to believe what’s happened in the interim. All of the props from the first year would have easily fit into the back of a pickup truck. This season, we’re rolling out four towed trailers and a brand new drag-race style Christmas tree starting system. The fun goes on and on. New people and new places add to the pleasure of meeting some of the greatest people who walk on the face of this planet. Thanks for playing!

Have You Been Watching the Olympics?

Originally, the Olympics were about the athletes. The ethos of sport- higher, faster, stronger was easily understood by all. However, the Olympics have lost some of their allure, as member nations are not unlike major sports franchises: athletes giving up citizenship for a berth on a foreign county’s team. The Olympics were supposed to be about the individual athletes, but that’s not going to pay the huge production cost, so countries like Greece go bankrupt to put on a show that they can ill-afford. Long ago, the hometown team was comprised of local guys who had roots in the community. Now, it’s about the highest bidder.

In a nation where sports figures assume near god-like stature, one has to reflect on what is really important. Millions of people badly in need of exercise watch athletes badly in need of rest. Salaries bear sad testimony to our inverted value system. In a perfect world, first grade teachers should be at the top of the pyramid. Or as Lee Iacocca said, “Only the best would be teachers and the rest would have to settle for something else.”

But whether it’s a visit to the Dallas Cowboys palace with Mark Gist or Disney World last week, there are lessons that can be learned and transferred to make the Firefighter Combat Challenge better and better. Many Olympians have trained intensely for four years to get their 12 seconds in the limelight. Listening to the NBC commentary, I was making the comparisons between these world-class athletes and our own FCC Competitors.

Some of this stuff is heart-wrenching. A single slip and it’s all down the tubes. Things that are outside your control. Skiing down the side of the mountain at 60+ mph and catching an edge; inconsistency in the ice; white-out conditions; blizzards, melting snow, broken Zamboni’s and so on and so forth. And it’s not just at the Olympics. How about NASCAR’s premier race the Daytona 500? Having to stop the race for more than two hours to round up all the Bondo® in the universe to fix a pothole on the course. That cost NASCAR 17 million Fox viewers and a lot of prestige.

Just about all of the sports that happen outdoors have weather-related issues. Track and field will negate any wind-aided records. In golf, if you play in the morning, the greens are wet. Rodeo is animal-dependent. We all know about the NFL and their “go in any condition” policy. Plus, the kicking game becomes very much a crap-shoot with winds aloft having a huge part in the outcome. And speaking of outcomes, what about a blown call changing the winning team- a factor that occurs with annoying regularity.

Baseball calls it quits as soon as it starts to rain, but again wind and temperature have a lot to do with what happens with the long fly balls. So, outside of bowling, curling, billiards and a few other hermetically-controlled indoor sports, weather, time of day, etc. are a part of sport. Even in drag racing, a pretty much, straight-ahead, reaction-time activity has their preferred lanes.

So what’s the take-away? We carry close to 200,000 pounds of stuff over 35,000 miles each year and set-up more than 20 times the Scott Firefighter Combat Challenge with a consistency that sees a guy like Joe Horton come within seconds of his PR at each race. We strive mightily to tweak the rules to be unlike basketball; i.e., “keep the officials out of it.”

Weather, especially rain can impact traction. As a parking-lot based sport, we are held hostage to the surface that the host can provide. Sometimes, we’re square in the middle of downtown, between the curbs on Main Street. Or, under the $100M VivaVision on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. We walk a balancing act between providing the viewing public with a great show or sequestering ourselves to obscure locations with great traction. Difficult choices sometimes. We are well aware that the coefficient of friction of the thermoplastic gliders on the Keiser Forcible Entry Simulator, i.e., “the Slammer” changes with temperature. We are driven by our relentless pursuit for perfection in an imperfect world. In the grand scheme of sport, we run a pretty consistent and professional contest.

“Everyone’s a critic” is an epitaph that is frequently heard in all walks of life and certainly has applicability in sport as proven by the sports pages. There are a lot of gainfully employed reporters who make a pretty good living criticizing. But, we’re looking for solutions. Our search for perfection is not driven to make things easier; it’s to make them the same. The “level playing field“ is a reference that is based on sport and it’s a part of our mission.

Your dedication does not go unnoticed. Similarly, in fulfillment of our obligation, we invest thousands of dollars and man-hours to continually improve the platform. We just want to provide you with the stage that you deserve to showcase your talents to our stakeholders: the taxpayers who foot the bill for the best fire protection that we can provide. As the Olympics came to a conclusion, I couldn’t help but reflect on how so many of you train with the intensity of the world-class athletes that you are. I’m sorry that there are not million-dollar endorsements awaiting your successes. But I believe that there are great rewards that transcend the receipt of a medal. There are actual people walking around today that would not have been able to do so without your intervention. That’s something that you can live with.

FFCC.TV

We have an incredibly visual sport. I’m not sure that I fully appreciated how visual until picking up a video camera this year and attempting to create video shorts from each event. We need more cameras to capture all the action. This has been a lot of fun putting these clips together for these first four events. I marvel at the technology that allows you to do on a laptop computer what used to take a $250k editing suite. We’re employing some very talented videographers and will continue to improve the quality and interest of each of the postings. We’re spending a lot of effort on this project because we believe that there’s an audience for what you do. Speaking of which, the opening remarks by Chief Rich Collins of the Osceola County Fire Department were the most inspiring ever. He’s now on YouTube and will be incorporated into our newly launched TV website: FFCC.TV. Everyone needs to hear Chief Collins and we’ll do our part.

Our next step is to begin the daunting task of capturing and cataloging all of the Firefighter Combat Challenge video at one location. We invite all of you very creative amateur video producers to put a short feature together and bring it to the rest of the Challenge competitors. Watch the Hot News for details on how you can add value to our sport.

Part 1: Firefighter Combat Challenge and TV

Part 1: Firefighter Combat Challenge and TV

In 1992, at our inaugural championship, FETN did a 30-minute special feature that was distributed to their satellite customers. In 1993 we were on ESPN and stayed there for 10 years with a one-hour show. For a variety of reasons discussed below, our show was not renewed and we have subsequently moved to Versus.

The purpose of this article is to provide the reader with an overview of how television works, how we fit into the equation and what are our plans for the future. As always, every Challenge competitor is solicited for his or her opinion and suggestions on how we can grow the sport. So, here goes.

TV comes in two flavors; network and cable/satellite. Advertisers pay for production costs and content is freely distributed with the hope that viewers will purchase their product. With cable, the subscriber pays for content with some channels also subsidized by commercials.

Sport on TV is an interesting model. Because some sports are so attractive to the masses, sponsors will provide lots of money to associate their product with those qualities that we hold so dear- strength, speed, etc. Professional sports attract varying levels of paid attendance. The rights-holders (team owners) can command large sums of money to control access to their events. They do this through ticket sales as well as broadcast rights. The Firefighter Combat Challenge does not have sufficient general, or even special market appeal to command a gate (the money you pay to get in). Until we are able to demand that people pay to see our act, we’re going to be severely limited in what we can do on TV.

Academic sports as differentiated from professional sports are actually the farm system for the majors; ergo they command a gate. Minor sports (wrestling, track, etc.) are able to sometimes collect a fee if sufficient friends and relatives come to watch the event and are held hostage. This simply analogy to other organized sports and the Firefighter Combat Challenge should help your understanding as to where we are when it comes to bargaining for visibility in an already cluttered field of entertainment. Said another way, while our Challenge competitors may have the fitness of world-class athletes, there are insufficient numbers of people in the general market to command an entrance fee.

If you saw the first Firefighter Combat Challenge appearance on ESPN, I doubt that you would have been impressed. We’d like to think that we’ve come a long way. But, the Scott Firefighter Combat Challenge is not in a category where the viewing public will pay to attend or even pay to watch it on VOD. So how can we change that? Well, as always, we’re open to your thoughts on what you think that the masses- not your family or friends would like to see. Keep in mind, TV is about audience appeal, and audiences vote with the remote at the speed of light. Don’t like this program?, no problem, there are hundreds of others to surf through.

The Tandem Revisited

Before we start the 2009, now is a good time to revisit our Tandem program. Clearly, there’s a lot of traction as evidenced by the huge increase in numbers this past year. The Tandem was Jay Staeden’s creation. He posited the concept on one of our morning runs. We dropped the double run for a couple of reasons, the first being the amount of time it takes for a double run.

We strongly urge all new players to use the Tandem as their entrée to the Challenge. It’s a good way to get a gauge of where you are before alternatively making a fool of yourself, or getting in too deep. With what appears to be a need to get more women engaged, the tandem eliminates the problems of rounding up entire team. In fact, we can find a partner, much as a pick-up round of golf, if you don’t already have some one to partner with. Cory, Mike, Bill, Chuck, Jeannie have all had great comments and I invite their posting here.

Register through Google with a legitimate user name. Courteous exchanges are the norm here.

The first proposal, which has already been eclipsed by some of the CAB member suggestions was to break the Dummy Drag in half. So, have at it.

On Sportsmanship

When was the last time that this happened: A base runner in MLB being called out at first base, then arguing with the umpire, expecting that the ump would say, “You know, I believe that you’ve convinced me of the error of my ways; I’m going change my mind and call you safe.”

Why would you expect any different outcome at the Firefighter Combat Challenge? I’m amazed on those rare occasions when a competitor commits a foul and then attempts to make a federal case out of it.

Sportsmanship, the class act of winning and losing graciously is very much in evidence at the Challenge. In fact, spectators new to our sport are amazed at the professionalism as well as the respect with which opponents are treated. It is not unusual to observe the outcome of a very close relay race and be unable to tell who won as a consequence of not looking at the clock. The euphoria of a close race, the exuberance of the athletes as they congratulate each other is what I like very much about our sport.

But, we do have from time to time our hotheads. Throwing protective equipment such as a helmet is not a cool thing. Like it or not, firefighters are role models and should always accord themselves as such. Back in the 70’s I worked for the Washington Redskins when George Allen was the head coach. He was a stickler for treating helmets with respect. Throwing, kicking or sitting on helmets was a forbidden practice and would result in a fine.

We expect this same level of respect at the Challenge. We ask that you resist the temptation to display your anger by spiking the dummy. By this we mean anything other than allowing Rescue Randy to simply slide out of your grip and onto the matt. The act of lifting and slamming is prohibited and will result in a penalty, or if flagrant, disqualification. Not only does this harm a very expensive prop, but you would never do this to a victim. Think of how you look to the public when you put on such a spectacle. We know that reading this right now, you’d never think of committing such an act. If you have a beef, there’s a right way to deal with it- respectfully. But judgment calls are not subject to debate. =

Kicking off Season 2008

Getting ready for this season has been particularly difficult. Normally we have another 7 plus weeks to get ready. Our purchase of the newest addition to our fleet, the Kenworth/Dorsey took far longer than I thought. Ultimately, we barely had a week to take delivery in Bakersfield, drive it to Fresno for some last minute arrangements then head to Real Wheels in Gurnee for their finishing touches. Then off to D.C. for a kickoff on the US Mall on the 2nd of April. This is after returning from 3 weeks in New Zealand where the 2nd National Firefighter Combat Challenge Championship was held in Nelson. That will be the subject of another Blog entry. The D.C. event was made more tenuous because we could not have access to the site until well past noon on the 1st. This was an incredible effort, made possible by the dedication of John Tillett, Chuck DeGrandpre, Tim Roberson, Shane Farmer, Brent Davis, Matt Haire, Brittany Davis, Daniel Pace, Jay Staeden, Clint Lamb, Rich Klimm, Rex Nimrod and Andy from Knoxville Squad 7. The retrograde was likewise a very difficult task with an expectation to vacate 4th Street by 5PM. We almost made it. But, the effort was clearly worth it. The Tug-o-War between the United States and the United Kingdom was spectacular. More on this as well.