Britson Park & Athletic Complex Chili Cookoff Fundraiser

What a great time, and a great turnout for the Chili Cookoff. When you are part of a team working to put something like this together, you never really know what you will get. Will anybody enter chili? Will we get a crowd to show up?

The answer was yes and yes. We had 19 entries of chili. We don't have an exact count on attendance, because we got extra donations on the price of admission, but we are guessing north of 150 people.

Since we knew we were getting plenty of chili, I moved from cooker of chili to judge. That was fun. The judges were The Roland Rocket himself, Gary Thompson; Roland-Story Middle School Principal John Sheahan; Iowa State Head Softball Coach Stacy Gemeinhardt-Cesler; and me as Mayor. A picture of the judges is on this post.

I had never met Gary Thompson before. I've seen him at ISU events, and was excited to meet the guy that put Roland on the map. What a great guy. Got to talk to him for about 15 minutes, and talk about Roland then and now.

We made around $3000 on the silent auction. Thanks to all the businesses that supported our event. All together, we got around $5000, so that is a nice kickoff to getting the park built.

As for the winners:
Specialty: (which is a soup that is not chili). We had 2 entries and the winner was Adam Pitman with Cheeseburger Soup.
Mild had 13 entries, and the winner was Kelly Popp with PoppaK's Chili. He told me it was a last minute entry as a whim.
Hot had 4 entries, and the winner piled on with the cool name: Roland Rocket Fuel by Audra and Larry Ford
The winner of The People's Choice (People could vote for their favorite chili by dropping money in a container by the chili--with the money going to the park) and Adam Pitman took home his 2nd trophy of the night, with the win there as well.

The crowd hung around, the games in the gyms kept the kids busy, we even had one of the Britson daughters come all the way from Chicago for the event. A fun night all around.

As a reminder, if you want to help with the park, you can purchase a brick for the park, and get your name on it. 4x8 bricks for a $100 donation, and 8x8 bricks for a $200 donation. You can go to www.britsonpark.org for more info.