A Champion is crowned… and a TON of money was raised!
Some news and notes the day after…
- Congratulations to #DoBetter on the title. I believe this is the first Championship by a non-A team since we created divisions. The team pulled off 3 consecutive wins over A teams en route to the title. Fantastic play and a well deserved championship! The final 4 was a series of great matches and capped an incredible night of highly competitive Volleyball. As I said last year, the talent in the tournament continues to rise!!
- The full bracket results from the tournament have been posted on the Growler website: https://growlervolleyball.com/blog/
- Giving is essentially $192K at the moment. This is a combination of what’s on SB already, plus what we got in cash last night and some other “known” $$ that hasn’t hit the site yet (but will soon)… plus the initial $25k from “Growler Invitational Beach Volleyball Tournament”. What this means is once the “checks clear” we have officially topped 1.5 million!!! Let that sink in…
- We are #1 in NC and Top 10 in the nation once again!! And we aren’t done… donations are still trickling in, some pending matches haven’t hit, some checks are not yet cashed, and GIBVT will be making a final donation once we settle the books:)
- As alluded to above…. in Mizfit fashion, an ADDITIONAL fundraiser will be a little late and involve drinking. Please come out to Lone Rider Hideout off Westgate Road, Tuesday, 8/26 any time after about 4:00 to raise $$ for St. Baldrick’s. Just show up and buy beer, what could be easier or more fun?! La Republica food truck will be there! https://www.instagram.com/loneriderbeer?igsh=b3J5N3NzZTRxaTJ5 Wear a Growler shirt if you have one!
My last ask for 2025…. Clean Up day is this Saturday as we break down the little village we have created. Please come out to assist as of 9am. We are not planning to serve food this year because last year we were soo fast that most left by 11am. Only 16 of 30 spots have been officially been snagged on the volunteer website. The more hands the faster this will go. Also, if you have your own personal tents etc up… please plan to remove them on Saturday or before.
Highlights from 2025
- We navigated the gauntlet of 7 Growler related event dates with all of the “smaller” events (Jr, Her, Masters) increasing their profits over last year. In general, admission were down Weeks 1-3 but last night may have caught us back up as I believe we set a record in the attendance realm last evening (will know for sure as we finalize numbers).
- We did the best we could with Parking and though some challenges remain we have set a better precedent for the future! Thanks to those who helped with Parking…being outside the event, these roles are tougher to staff, but your help is SOO appreciated. No one was towed this year and we made some friends with the Security crew that should prove beneficial in years to come!
- Registration was improved and we are closer to having this flow more efficiently…but some tweaks for next year remain in the cards.
- Shaving event was a joy to watch. Thanks to all who shaved!!
- Player Pavilion… checked all the boxes that it did last year! Thanks GFL, Jersey Mike’s, and Pepsi.
Thank you notes from Bill Speri…(was a late night and a lot of the below a direct copy from last year… but since it still RINGS true… I am using my favorite slogan for Growler and “running it back”)
- Thank you to the GROWLeadERship team. You all are fantastic to work with and I hope you feel FANTASTIC about what you’ve helped accomplish. I’ve never been around a better set of volunteers! I love the ownership you all show in your individual piece parts of this now “major event”. Let me specifically mention Cristine Allison and Frank Koch as they have been so critical to our success and making this event “fun” for me!
- Thank you specifically to Brian Tobey and Kevin Hampton for the work that have done on beer and food! This remains a mini challenge week to week but is SOO much better than it used to be. Maybe next year we solve Food to the level where Beer is :)
- Thank you to all of our Sponsors! Please pass on my Thanks to any of the sponsors you all help to bring to this event. As always, the sponsors were amazing and we hope to reboot with all of them in 2026 and maybe even add a few more to the mix. We had 88 sponsors this year (A record! – Thanks Haleigh for managing these so efficiently this year). Please visit any of the food sponsors that assisted in 2025 in the months following the event and tell them Thanks for their support and help tie your patronage to what they did at the Growler.
- Thank you to the Growler teams for getting engaged as participants on the St Baldrick’s webpage (we did fantastic in this area this year with 228 participant pages out of 317 players). I hope you saw the $s increase as our participants increased. It takes a village! The GPI once again helped drive donations and volunteering. We may make a small tweak to this for next year just so we can equate the different areas to a “percentage”… aka Volunteering equals 20%, Donations 25% etc but the end result should essentially be the same.
- LASTLY… Thank you to all of YOU!! I can’t tell you how many people come up to me and express their Thanks to me for what I do each year. It isn’t why I do it… but it sure does feel good to be recognized and it shows WHY we are successful in raising this $$ for St Baldrick’s. You all are just great people! It’s not just me of course and I do pass your well wishes onto the rest of the GROWLeadERship Team whenever possible. Looking forward to 2025 and how we can keep the train moving forward!
We’ll be doing some planning in the weeks ahead as we identify lessons learned and takeaways from this year. We hope you all enjoyed yourselves and welcome any feedback you may have (just shoot me an email).
Signing off “from the beach” for now… but I’ll be back once the dust settles with where we wind up with Fundraising!! I am sure we will top $200K… will we surpass $216k? We shall see!!
Thanks Again to all!!
Bill Speri
wmsperi@gmail.com