I must apologize - it was my intent to tell my Centennial stories in quick succession. Unfortunately the advent of school has reduced my ability to blog. Still, I saunter on and intend to complete these, but I suspect that these posts will be less detailed as time goes on. I digress...

The theme for September 11th, 2009 was youth, so we called it our Future Day. The day itself was really just two large events. The first being the Youth Performing Arts Showcase, and the second was supposed to be a Battle of the Bands for local youth bands. I was in charge of the Battle of the Bands, but for some reason I only ended up with two bands entering. As a result we turned it into a concert, and we were able to secure Seventh Rain as our headline band. This was arranged by Al Jones at Here's the Scoop, and I can't thank him enough!

Jumping back a little bit, the idea of having a youth performing arts showcase was conceived early in the planning process. We had two teachers on our committee that were going to work on it, but like many committee members do, they mysteriously vanished a few months after arriving. Even though I was heading up the planning of the youth day, I had no clue how to plan a showcase of various choirs and bands. So myself and another committee member put out a call to all the schools to attend a meeting about hosting such an event. We told all the teachers that attended that we would provide them with a venue and the staging, seating, etc. they would need as well as promote the event. We tasked them with actually organizing it, which is a ton of work. It didn't help that our event would occur during the first week of school, so all the planning would have to be done the previous school year.

It amazes me now that it all worked out. I only attended one meeting with the teachers, and then sort of sent them on their way. One of the teachers took on a leadership role and ensured everything got done. On my part it wasn't exactly the best model of community development, but I think it just goes to show that if people are passionate about something they will ensure it gets done and done well.

I arrived at the park Friday morning at about 7:00am and began setting up a few things that we'd need for the remaining days. We all thought Friday would be a pretty quiet day that would allow us to get some things ready for Saturday and Sunday. We were wrong. Very wrong. You see, we knew we were getting 600+ kids, but they were coming throughout the day. There weren't going to be more than 100 kids at a time, so no big deal, right? Well, a lot of the schools decided to make a field trip of it and stayed for most of the day. We also failed to consider that 600 kids equals about 1000 to 2000 parents/grandparents/relatives.





Due to this event taking place during a regular school/work day, we had a pretty limited pool of volunteers. Thankfully those we did have possessed superhuman volunteer skills. We managed the onslaught of people pretty well, but our parking was only being manned by one poor volunteer and it quickly fell into carmageddon with people parking wherever they felt like even if it meant blocking in an entire row of vehicles. It got pretty bad, but the volunteers pulled together and made it functional again.





I was in and out of the park quite a bit on this day running various errands. At one point I had to make a mad dash to Enterprise to rent a truck because my coworker's truck broke down at the gas station. It was a crazy day. The upshot was that I ended up with a big obnoxious truck that I was largely incapable of parking until Sunday. (By that point I was backing it up into parking stalls and everything. If you know me, vehicles + parking lots often result in disaster. Going in reverse is just a horrible multiplier.)

Due to my frequent absences I don't have a lot of pictures of the performances. I do have some of the George McDougall band though because I know a few of the kids in it, and I didn't want to miss them.





We had about a four hour break between the school performances and the concert starting. This gave us a nice window of time to catch our breath (and eat) and start setting up for the concert. There was a Centennial High School football game during this time, but none of us attended. Apparently Bert Church High School destroyed George McDougall High School. GMHS has a sweet band, though.

We had three bands lined up for the Centennial Youth Concert. Local bands 'Storm', and 'Autumn Arson' would open for 'Seventh Rain'. All three bands started to show up at around 5:30pm to setup all the equipment. I offered to help, but there was about ten of them and they all knew what they were doing. Me? Not so much… So I just sort of hung out and was generally useless. At least I got pictures.





To be completely honest, I was really concerned about turnout for this event. I’ve run a number of youth events in Airdrie that were very poorly attended. There were only 68 people who confirmed on the Facebook event page, and I honestly would have been happy with that number. :P Teenagers started arriving as early as 6:00, many of them attending the sound check the bands were doing. And then they kept coming and coming. Once the football game was done a new flood of youth swarmed the park. It was wonderful! If I had to guess, I’d say we easily had 1500 people there, possibly more.





Working with young people is what I do, so I do not hold the typical stereotypes about them that many people do. Despite having many, many youth in the park most of them were being very well behaved. We had a few minor incidents, but nothing to really get worried about. Still, I’ve done this type of work long enough that if you get a whole lot of teenagers in one spot, especially on a Friday night, you should be prepared for all possible outcomes. As such, I called the RCMP just to give them a heads-up that we would have a large gathering of people that would be there until at least 10pm. The security that we hired for the weekend asked if they could bring on an additional officer. Initially I said no, but as more and more kids started coming and we had more incidents of alcohol possession, I agreed to have another officer come out. In the end the company donated the extra officer, so that was really nice.



The performances themselves were awesome! We started with Storm, a local band that I’ve had come out to a few of my events now. Storm consists of two brothers who play guitar, bass, piano, and sing., as well as a friend of theirs who is the drummer. The drummer didn’t make this show (as well as some previous ones) and I got the feeling he might not be their drummer for much longer! The two brothers in the band are very down to earth and some of the nicest kids I’ve ever met. They have amazing support in their parents that come out to all their gigs and usually setup their equipment and film the whole thing. Let me tell you, these are model parents. I love them! I also love the fact that every time I ask them to perform (always for free) the whole family is incredibly grateful and thankful. Anyway, they did an excellent job and really got the crowd going.







Next up was Autumn Arson. I hadn’t heard these guys before aside from their submission for the Battle of the Bands. I had actually met a couple of the members before as part of something I was doing in the schools, but I didn’t know they had a band. I listened to their first couple songs and was quite impressed with what I heard. The crowd was going crazy with these guys. Unfortunately I was running errands around the park (mostly picking up garbage and shooing kids out of tents) so I missed a lot of their stuff. Still managed to snap some pics though:







Rounding out the evening was Seventh Rain. Once these guys hit the stage a lot of the kids roaming about made their way to the entertainment tent. Seventh Rain isn’t a hugely popular band, but they’re quite well known in Calgary and area. They actually opened for Sloan a few months back, but I missed that concert. They played all original stuff except for one cover of ‘I Gotta Feeling’, which was pretty epic. These guys even had quite a few groupies swarming over them and doing the whole ‘scream when he looks at me’ thing. Not that that’s the only sign of a good concert, but it was a pretty good seal of approval. Once again, pictures:







Once the concert was done a lot of people left the park, but there were still plenty of youth mingling around. Technically the park closes at 10pm, so I just let the security people see that everyone left. They might have been lingering but there were no problems, so I seemed harmless enough. Where we did have a problem was trying to get all the girls off the stage and out of the tent once Seventh Rain was done. At one point one of the members of the band asked us to get them all off stage because he didn’t want to do it and look like a jerk. :) Some of them remained until well after the concert and didn’t leave until the bands left. In the end I was very, very satisfied with how everything went and really impressed with the youth in this community not only for coming out but also for behaving really well. I can easily say that this day is probably the highlight of my youth-serving career so far.