As I’ve mentioned before, my early scouting was very rural
in nature. (Cub Scouts and first year as
a Boy Scout were in a town of 5,000 – with two Cub Scout packs and two
troops. The rest of my boyhood scouting
was in a town of 15,000 with three packs and two troops. My first three years as a Scouter were in a
town of 3500 with a pack and a troop.)
As Cub Scouts, we didn’t really care about other packs, and my first
boyhood troop never really compared itself with others, or possibly as a 5th-6th
grader I just didn’t notice.
But all that changed in January 1981 when I moved a few
hundred miles northwest and joined my second boyhood troop. On our first Sunday in the new town, we
visited a church. On that bitterly cold
and snowy Sunday, I was one of only three boys in the 6th grade
Sunday School class. The other two lit
up when I mentioned I was a Boy Scout – seems they both were also. But one was from each troop in town. The troops each met Monday night, and my
method of choosing which one to visit first was simple and logical (at least to
my 11-year-old mind): one troop met at
the church across the parking lot from the one we were visiting. That meant I could tell my parents how to
get there on Monday. The other troop,
it turned out, was less than two blocks away, but out of sight (and out of
mind).
By sheerest coincidence, the night I visited was the night
the troop was reorganizing. I got to
vote for SPL (the very definition of “uniformed voter” – I remember asking the
guy who invited me to tell me the name of “The guy on the left” so I could vote
for him). After the SPL vote, I was sent
into a side room with 5 other 11 and 12 year old scouts, and we were told to
elect a patrol leader, come up with a patrol name and patrol yell, and pick a
night to hold a patrol meeting to make our flag before next week’s
meeting. I was hooked, and never even
visited the other troop until years later when I was part of the Order of the
Arrow Election Team for that troop. (But
that’s another blog post.)
My new patrol was a bunch of hot shots, and we wanted to be
the best at everything. We met to make
our patrol flag, and that was a lot of fun.
So the next week, we met on Thursday, just our patrol, to practice
knots. (Did I mention our Patrol Leader’s
Dad was our Chartered Organization Rep, and knew meeting plans in advance? We practiced knots because the game the
following Monday was a knot relay race and we wanted to “embarrass the patrol
of older guys.”)
Given that attitude, is it any surprise that when the Spring
Camp-o-ree packet came out and listed the events, we started a series of weekly
patrol meetings to practice those skills?
In those first few months with my new troop, I quickly
noticed that almost every week there was a reference or two made to the “other
troop in town” – either of the general idea that “they’re no good” or that
“we’ve got to work hard to show those
guys who is the better troop!” By
the time, a couple of years later, that I realized we shouldn’t have to work so
hard if the other troop wasn’t any good – well, by then I understood the
game. And I participated too, telling
younger scouts they had to work hard to “be the best troop in town.”
You know where this is going . . . we were a very rural
district also, and our two troops competing against each other to be the best
in everything made us far and away the best two troops in the district. (It didn’t hurt that our town of 15,000 had
half the population of our county, and a third of the population of our
district. Most of the other troops in
our district had only a single patrol).
I got to see the flip-side of this when I was a college
student and Assistant Scoutmaster in a town of 3500. We were the only troop in town, and had two
patrols – about 8 first year scouts, and 5 or 6 older boys. We were a fairly good troop, but we lacked
that extra little spark. Either of my
hometown troops would have run rings around these guys.
When I landed at my second troop as an Assistant
Scoutmaster, we had the opposite problem. We were one of 5 troops within a 5 mile
circle on the “near west side” of Springfield IL. It was very difficult to try to be
competitive against “those guys” when everywhere you turned there were more of them. And a lot of them were very old
and very good troops.
Since we couldn’t win at that game, we changed the
rules. As we grew a bit, we split the
troop into two very small patrols. Our
troop of six scouts in the fall of 1990, operating as a single patrol, grew to
ten scouts in February 1991. So we
“converted” the elected Patrol Leader into the Senior Patrol Leader, and had
him pick an Assistant SPL. We made the
SPL acting Quartermaster and ASPL acting Scribe, and divided the other 8 boys
into two patrols of four. Then we set
two challenges. 1. Which patrol can reach six members
first? 2. Which patrol can get half of its members to
First Class rank fastest? The winner of
each challenge was given a small prize (25 years has clouded my memory, but I
suspect they got gift certificates to the Baskin-Robbins next door to the
council office).
Our little competitions got a great response, and we had a
bang-up year recruiting (we went from 10 Scouts in February to 34 Scouts in
June of 1991), and we had observed some (ahem) issues regarding behavior of our older scouts.
So, starting in September 1991, we began our
“Honor Patrol” competition. Every
Monday evening, as Scoutmaster, I updated a spreadsheet with each patrol’s running
score, and at each Court of Honor, we announced the winning patrol. There were two prizes, and as the scouts
matured, the relative value of the prizes reversed. The immediate short-term prize was one of
the ubiquitous Baskin-Robbins gift certificates. (B-R was in our neighborhood, and
literally next door to the Council Office.
I usually had $10 or $15 worth of gift certificates in my
briefcase.) The second prize, which
quickly became the more important of the two, was a visible symbol. Our troop wore custom neckerchiefs, and
pretty early on, we established that the current Honor Patrol wore theirs with
the ends folded over about an inch before they rolled them. This gave the neckerchiefs a distinct “cut
off” appearance. And, of course, made it
easy to tell from a long distance that THIS scout was in the best patrol in the
troop (at least for this quarter).
The points each patrol earned were based on whatever goals
we had for the troop at the time, and changed every so often. In general, points were awarded for members
being present, in uniform and with pen, paper and Scout Handbook. Points were given for good behavior each
meeting (that is, a bank of 50 points was given to the patrol each week, and if
there were behavior issues points were deducted). Major points were given for Advancement,
holding a patrol meeting separate from the troop meetings, and completing the
requirements for the National Honor Patrol Award.
I bet you can guess the result . . . we usually had four
patrols in the troop, and they spent a LOT of effort trying to be the best
patrol in the troop.
And in the end,
that propelled us to a place as one of the best troops in the council.
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