Community Corner

Collingswood Odyssey of the Mind Takes 13th at Worlds

But organizer Kenneth Allendoerfer said the real win came from a community that supported the program in its inaugural year.

They surprised their parents and coaches with a strong showing at regionals. Then they wowed the judges at states.

Finally, the Collingswood Odyssey of the Mind (OTM) pet project team pushed their performance as far as it could go—which, in this case, was Michigan State University, for the world finals of the youth creativity and problem-solving competition.

In the end, they placed 13th among 55 competing teams in their division. As coordinator-coach-motivator Kenneth Allendoerfer put it, “thirteenth in the world isn’t too shabby,” especially when the first-place team beat their nearest competitors by a considerable margin. 

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“A rock-solid performance, but at the level of worlds, everybody gives a rock-solid performance,” Allendoerfer said.

“And [our kids] were pretty close on the second part, which is the spontaneous part. That had been their strong suit at states and regionals.”

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When they weren’t competing, the Collingswood team took the opportunity of the trip to mingle with other children from throughout the world, including their fellow contingents from Haddonfield and Haddon Heights. Pin trading, a popular Olympic obsession, was a big activity, Allendoerfer said.

Perhaps his biggest takeaway from the entire process, however, was the discovery that the whole of Collingswood could so suddenly get behind a project as rapidly escalating in scope—and cost—when the team started to achieve at a high level.

“When they did so well at the state, and then were faced with this thing that we really had no idea that we were going to have to do, honestly, I was pretty intimidated by that,” Allendoerfer said.

“The lesson is that people are unbelievably generous,” he said. “We suddenly had people that I didn’t know, that I’d never met, who don’t know my kids. They’re coming up and giving us $25 bucks to take the kids to this.

“It almost felt a little bit too easy, and that was because people were all together on it,” Allendoerfer said. “That was extremely cool.” 

That generosity was especially cast in relief when considering the financial plight of some of the neighboring OTM teams, he said.

“Haddon Heights a few years ago was invited to worlds, and they just weren’t able to get the money together, and they couldn’t go,” Allendoerfer said.

Without the strength of the Collingswood recreation program backing OTM, Allendoerfer said, the program might not have had the stability necessary to organize itself so capably and in such short order.

“There is a lot of education that has to go on for people to kind of see what things are about,” he said. “Odyssey has this sort of funny name and nobody’s heard of it; there’s a lot of explaining and convincing. It’s not in a bad way, but you’ve got to keep doing it over and over again." 

Naturally, now that the program has achieved so much, the next objective for Allendoerfer becomes how to capitalize on that momentum for the future. Because Odyssey is a months-long project, its success becomes as much about managing the length of the process, he said.

“The kids by the end of it were pretty burnt out,” Allendoerfer said. “When you start doing these tournaments in March, it wasn’t until the end of May that it was over with. [I’ve developed] a new respect [for] how coaches, trainers, teachers manage to sustain an endeavor with kids for a long duration of time.”

Next up for the team? Expanding its efforts. Coaches, judges and subject matter experts are in high demand, especially given the all-volunteer basis of the intermediate competitions leading up to worlds. So, too, is space to store gear and host practices. Perhaps the next step is an OTM booster club.

“Now we’re going to come up against new obstacles, which I think are scaling obstacles,” Allendoerfer said. “Can I get enough coaches? Can I get enough space? Can I get enough officials? I think that some of our other youth programs kind of have the same problems.

“Those are good problems to have, but it’s going to be very interesting,” he said.


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