9th Annual Beer Olympics!

As the cold weather sets in and the holiday lights glimmer, let's take it back a few months and reminisce real quick on our penultimate and 9th annual Beer Olympics!

It's so hard to explain Beer Olympics to someone who has never experienced it firsthand. It's a day of drinking games, yes. But also so much more in a weirdly sentimental, make some new friends, competitive, but good hearted, feel good day. I don't know how to describe it but to say - that months and years later when I see people from various sects of our life chatting and laughing together and ask them about how they know each other, often times it begins with "at Beer Olympics," and that somehow describes everything about everything.

We had a beautiful, blue sky day in late June to celebrate our 9th annual event. Greyson's all-star machine pitch baseball team had a tournament that day - so for the first time in nine years, I was flying solo as host for the first half of the day! Thankfully though, I had no stress about it because our Beer Olympic veterans are so amazing and kind and helpful and know the ropes of how the day works. 

As in Beer Olympic fashion, we start the day with a game of Sloshball while we organize the teams, then it's face painting & color hair spraying by team names (we chose to do all Hashtag team names this year, HAH) before we dive right into the main event line up - beginning with Beer Pong and Hungry, Hungry, Hippong. 

Teams earn points by their performance on the various games and many of the games are tournament style so no matter what place you come in, you earn some team points. We also have individual non-mandatory challenges along the way if you feel inclined to earn some points for your team score like Keg Stands, Blow Ball, and Chug Offs. Following Beer Pong we have Dingbat Relay, and Ice Cube Tray Canoe Races.

God bless our friends who sign up to help ref or volunteer during the day too. I could not do this day without our friends who wear those whistles alongside me and put up with the incredible hilarity that comes with trying to organize progressively more intoxicated competitors. Half the success comes from observers (and helpful players trying to win the Olympian and Teacher's Pet awards!) who re-fill beer pitchers, replace kicked kegs, move tables to set up for the next games, and empty garbage cans.  Seriously, I love you all so much. 

To close out the first half of the day before the intermission; we play Slippy Cup (flip cup with a slip and slide) and Anchorman. 

I can't preach enough how important the intermission is for players to refuel (on tons of carbs) and non-alcoholic liquids. Another key to our beer olympics success is that everyone who comes brings something to share - so our garage slowly fills up as friends arrive with roasters, crockpots, desserts, and coolers filled with water and sports drinks. During intermission, the perimeter of our yard becomes the men's bathroom, bodies lay all over the place with plates of food balanced on their bellies, and we do a quick tally of the scores so teams can figure out how hard they need to rest before the games resume.  We plan for the intermission to last about 45mins, but inevitably it lasts at least an hour to a little more.

Then we ease back into the games with a flip cup tournament and a Quad bongs tournament.  The baseball team arrived back a little after intermission and Brandon said to me, "Geez, everyone seems like they are way more drunk than past years" and I laughed and was all like, "babe, that's only because you're sober this year." It's both hilarious and annoying to be on the Ref/sober side of the day, but it's my favorite so I take the whining with a smile and write down all the funny things people say and do to add into our awards ceremony at the end of the night.

My favorite event of the day is Survivor Flip Cup because people get seriously intense about it as it's the competition to rack up huge points for your team if you can keep a representative at a table for a long time (it's like musical chairs with the last one gets kicked off the table idea but with flip cup). And then it's one last chug offs before the Obstacle course finale.

Then it's another intermission while the refs tally team scores and decide on award winners before our big finishing ceremony - always a highlight of the day. We make a bunch of sashes with ridiculous awards and my sister compiles a playlist of songs to go with each award (hilarious!) and we do the whole thing like it's super official and celebratory. 

With the amazing generosity of our players and observers, we raised over $300 to support a local family and a local do-gooder who made a huge sacrifice to help them. It was a double dose of kindness that we were able to give this summer (YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME!!)

Our champs AGAIN this year was Team Pumpkins (#PSL)- two years reigning champs going into our final year of Beer Olympics! 

It's true, we are retiring the Studer's Invitational Beer Olympics after one last guns ablaze 10th annual event coming this summer; with a full weekend of fun, special surprises, and a year-in-advance invite already sent out (LOL). With growing kids and all their activities and just plain getting older (and hangovers that are harder and harder to recover from #sadbuttrue) - we know it's time to hang up our Beer Olympics sashes.

But first - one more time!

ps. Thanks for all who have read and followed along and re-pinned our posts.  Next August 2018, I will have a final Beer Olympics Planning Toolkit available to leave as a legacy. Stay tuned!

8th annual Studer's Invitational Beer Olympics

We held our 8th annual Studer's Invitational Beer Olympics event this year in October, a big change from our normal summer party. But this awesome event only a few weeks after the birth of our fourth baby was just not going to fly in our sleep-deprived rotten eight weeks.  So, we postponed it until early October and our friends and family braved the rain and chill to have a great time for a great cause!

The event is held at our home and as I say every single year, we could never ever do this without the help, graciousness, enthusiasm and kindness of our participants.  This day always reminds us of how incredibly grateful we are to be surrounded by so many amazing people.   And they all show up with a spirit of generosity and fun as we play together to raise funds for specific charitable goals.  This year, we were able to raise over $370 dollars for a local family that experienced health scares all  year - and who regularly inspire kindness and faithfulness to our entire community.

This year, we split up our 24 participants and organized them into eight teams of three for the day.  We gave them all Halloween themed team names (and corresponding face paint and hairspray!) and then dove right into the games for the day.  

After our customary warm-up game of Sloshball (kickball with booze), we follow our list of events and rules throughout the day while scores are doled out for each event to the teams depending on their performance.

 

We also sprinkle special 'challenge' competitions where each team member can earn a few extra points toward their total score.  We even incorporated the Dizzy Waitress game that made it's viral rounds around the nets this year.  

 

Now in our eighth year of the Studer's Invitational, it is mostly a self-running entity.  We have enough veteran players that everyone can assist with rule explanations to the newbies on their team, all players and observers come loaded down with food and drinks to share, and all day long we have people step in to help in any way during the day (replacing kegs, refilling toilet paper, cleaning up spills, and any other last minute tasks that come up.

Our favorite part of the day is always is the end of the night Award Ceremony where we hand out our individual awards for participants ranging from Loud Mouth to Teacher's Pet to Crybaby, to Most Valuable Drinker.  And then we end the day with the announcement of team's in their final order.  This year, team Pumpkin were the winners which means they'll have their team name added to our trophy stand and they got the first sips out of our Studer Torpedo.

It was another great year of Beer Olympics fun and another giant reminder that we are surrounded by people who are up for anything and who support our weird big ideas to help others.  Thank you to all of you that help make this day such a success.  we appreciate you all so much!