Geoff Simons (60) is the sport liaison co-ordinator for the games, the sixth time he has done the role, and one he feels entirely comfortable with.
Ask him for a short, detailed description of what his role is and Simons says it is a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
‘‘It's a bit of everything, really. Most of the sports who are involved have their own co-ordinators but in a national sporting event like this certain things have to be aligned,'' he said.
‘‘Some sports are totally different but you have to make them all part of the masters games. Most events you so are not multi-sports like this one.''
He was employed for the three months up to the start of the games and everything was shaping up well for their start on January 30.
‘‘We got up to 8000 athletes at one stage but now we're probably looking at 6000, which is on par with the last one two years ago. There are a lot of masters games now, all round the country, and they all feed off each other but people can't go to all of them.''
Simons helps out new co-ordinators of each sport, makes sure all the medals are at events, checks registrations, collates the results, looks after the ambassadors and generally helps out where he can.
‘‘We're all a big team here, really. A lot of things overlap. Everyone pitches in to help and we have got some great young people coming through. I'm becoming a rare beast - a male in event management.''
Simons said it was in the sport's own interest to be well organised and get as many teams as possible into their sport.
‘‘The sports can make money out of the more teams they get entering. People like it to be well organised. You look at football. They have consistently delivered and the teams keep coming back. A lot of guys I played rugby with are now playing that.''
Other individual sports were slowly growing.
He said a few people had raised the issue of the games entry fee - a $65 early bird fee has now passed - but he said that still only covered a third of the cost of running the games, and people got a lot of entertainment for what they paid.
Individual sports fees were on top of the games entry fee.
Simons, who lectures in event logistics at Otago Polytechnic, has been organising events for years.
He started the South Island co-educational under-15 rugby tournament more than 25 years ago and it is still going strong.
The 2016 event is set to be held at Peter Johnstone Park in Mosgiel.
