I’m Steve Lemky (Blammaham), a married, Forty three year old father of nineteen, seven and three year old daughters. In my day job, I animate cartoons for television productions. If you have had small children and a television set in the last decade and a half or so there’s a fair to reasonable chance you’ve seen my work. I live in North Delta B.C., a suburb of Vancouver, Canada.
I’ve played Blood Bowl since 1st edition and, with the exception of a small break to go to art school I’ve played constantly since I was sixteen years old. I’ve been the commissioner of many leagues that I’ve played in and always have enjoined the organizing end of league play in particular. I think I became involved with the online community in 2003, so I you might be familiar with me from other forums. Currently I’m the deputy commissioner of Thunderbowl, where I plan twelve events per year for our league, I also play the jerk that bugs everyone to play their games. Thunderbowl is a pretty serious passion of mine and while our coach numbers have dipped a bit in the last few seasons we remain at about 30 solid and committed coaches and close to 60 alum. In addition to my Thunderbowl duties I’m organizing the Spike! 2015 this year and I think we are gearing up for one of the best Spike!’s ever! We have a much better location for local and traveling coaches, we’re using the “Ironmanj” rule set and the commemorative figurine is looking great! Perhaps the project that I’m most proud of is the Deathbowl tournament I run to support people who live with PKU, a rare inborn error of metabolism where the person can not properly break down an amino acid in protein. The only treatment is adherence to a low protein diet. There’s a group of people who run a non profit organization dedicated to helping those who have PKU. My youngest daughter, Alayna is one of those people who has been helped by these great people. So far, in two years we have raised $2000.00 for CanPKU, 95% of which has come from Thunderbowl members. I’m in regular contact with as many leagues as I find around and show them the benefits of OLBBM and the like, for league tools.
Thunderbowl provides support to many of the leagues around our area in regards to OLBBM and commissioner support with downloadable paper game reports that are designed to mirror the layout of the OLBBM game report and work with the treasury sheet and the experience sheet (for meticulous record keepers). I reach out and contact as many of the local Commissioners to offer support and recently was able to supply another local league with three 40mm boards with dugouts, scatter templates and range rulers. 3 sets of custom block dice, giving those guys a great head start. That group now knows about the The NAF, the Spike!, OLBBM, the game sheets and are miles ahead of where we were, just starting out 15 years ago. While the boards and game gear were sales to support our league, the NAF is uniquely positioned for this sort of outreach support, in the form of information and downloadable content to league coaches and is the only organization that can manage that scale of support for league play. Even though those leagues run differently from Thunderbowl I’ve noticed that we have a lot of common ground when it comes to the items and services we need to maximize and make possible the best league experience for coaches and commissioners. To achieve this I think it’s important to use all the tools we have already in the community, that can harnessed for the benefit of all league players. Things like:
OLBBM: Every league that wants to use this tool will have access for support and for set up and hosting, as well as end user support for any issues that arise during use.
Fumbbl: I use Fumbbl as a tool to help teach new coaches, I have seen coaches improve very quickly playing Fumbbl. Inexperienced coaches won’t have fun being clobbered every game, getting some extra playing time helps get them up to speed and helps keep them engaged.
Reference Sheets: I think the NAF already has the reference sheets that I made for the former LD. These are a great partner to the OLBBM data base and are a valuable back up in the worst case scenario of an OLBBM disaster.
Then add some new areas of support that would be of great benefit to every league:
Advertising resources: A customizable set of business cards, posters and banner templates would be very useful and I’ll work to ensure that these are made available as soon as possible
Website/ Forum Hosting and Support: League communication is a key cog in every league, every league will get access and support for the set up of a forum that would be an important tool for any league
Commissioner Communication: Set up a private forum for all commissioners to share ideas, league management processes, and any NAF communication that need to be delivered directly to the NAF Commissioners.
All that is great and useful and I’m sure these projects and services would be welcomed, but to me that isn’t enough to justify another position on the NAF leadership committee.
My vision for the future, and the reason I see a need for an elected NAF League Director position, is perhaps a bit different than some. I live in an area of the world where league play trumps tournament play and at any one time there’s 4-6 active leagues with in a 4 hour car ride. I would love to have the opportunity to play INTER-LEAGUE games with those (and other leagues), with teams and players that I have a history and an emotional connection with. To this end I will work with other NAF members that feel the same and will endeavor to evolve OLBBM to be able to facilitate this new style of play. Inter-league play would, in effect, be a brand new style of tournament, but with players that die, skill up, then the teams return to their home league to continue their Blood Bowl journey. I don’t see different house rules and league management rules being a stumbling block to this as these games would probably be a vast minority of the games a team might play. The OLBBM modification would be the first and largest hurdle to this initiative, I know it’s going to take a load of work research and innovation, but I think that this is very possible to achieve. I think that giving this sort of tool for inter-leauge play will help build relationships between groups and personal coaches. This would be a research project that would need to have all the details and mechanics worked out once the viability of modifying OLBBM to work in this way has been established.
I’d like to thank everyone for reading all of this and I look forward to having an active and engaged LD in the NAF no matter which of the candidates is successful! S.