Kent Biggerstaff figures 17 years spent making all kinds of arrangements for major-league baseball players prepared him well for two weeks accommodating the needs of 10,000 senior athletes.

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Kent Biggerstaff, Director of Competition for Senior Olympics, takes a break at the remodeled Donora Field in North Park. Click photo for larger image. Related coverage Senior Olympian profile: Martha McEvoy Senior Games schedule

Biggerstaff, head trainer of the Pirates from 1986-2002, has spent the past two years as director of competition for the Pittsburgh Local Organizing Committee of the Summer National Senior Games-The Senior Olympics. He was the point man for finding the fields and courts for 18 sports, hiring competition managers for each, ensuring sufficient referees and equipment, and coordinating the different sports' schedules over 15 days.

He negotiated with North Hills municipalities and school districts to borrow their fields for softball and for Allegheny County to upgrade the North Park fields. He recruited local authorities such as Pitt swim coach Chuck Knoles and Carnegie Mellon track coach Dario Donatelli to run their respective sports.

All that may have paled compared to the task of answering the competitors' questions and complaints since the registration process heated up in January. Biggerstaff, 57, of Pine, spent the first hour or two of every day at the local committee's Oakland office trying to address seniors' concerns about scheduling conflicts, registration snafus and the like.

"I pride myself [that] I returned every one of those E-mails or phone calls," Biggerstaff said this week, a few hours after toting giant bags of base-lining material for softball fields. "Every resolution isn't what people wanted, but every resolution was consistent. ... They all have problems of some type, and they think theirs is the only one. Think of having 5,000 sets of your grandparents, and trying to please them all the time."

Biggerstaff notes such challenges more as observation than complaint, stressing that most seniors appreciate any efforts to help them. There are 10,400 individuals 50 and older registered to compete between now and June 18, starting with softball and tennis today, but because of absences for illness or other reasons, no more than 10,000 are likely to attend. About 500 will be from southwestern Pennsylvania.

Biggerstaff is preparing for a bigger number -- more than 18,000 -- because that represents the total participants, considering many people compete in multiple sports. There are 3,271 registered swimmers and 3,218 individual track competitors, plus 1,775 basketball players playing in 878 games and 2,023 softball players in 420 games at 11 locations. There are also more than 1,000 bicyclists and tennis players and hundreds more in each of a dozen other sports.

They are not necessarily the top Americans in their age groups and fields because many top-echelon senior athletes focus on other national competitions specific to their interest instead of the Senior Olympics, which have a broader social component to promote fitness. Regardless of their competitive level, age and sport, Biggerstaff said he feels a responsibility to them.

He said the Pittsburgh games attracted fewer registered participants than the 12,000 anticipated because some competitors at the last Senior Olympics two years ago in Hampton Roads, Va., found it disorganized and disappointing, particularly in softball. He wants to provide a better boost for the next event (in Louisville in 2007).

The biggest potential obstacle is one neither he nor anyone else associated with the event can control: the weather. Heavy rainfall in Virginia disrupted the schedule for softball and other outdoor events. The competition schedule here has a rain date built in every few days for makeup games, but any prolonged precipitation could be disastrous.

"The things you can control, you have to take steps to control those things, and, for the rest, you have backups in mind," he said. "The last two Junes have been among the wettest in history. I'm hoping that means we're going to have a dry one."