When you stop to think about it, a presidential debate is a lot like a cheerleading competition--opposing contestants going through their routines and lots of cheering.

Paul Edwards, general manager of the Myrtle Beach Convention Center, learned this firsthand when in the course of a few months he helped plan and organize both a 2008 Republican presidential primary debate and the national finals for high school cheerleaders.

“I’ll tell you one thing, the cheerleading competition in a lot of ways was more work,” Edwards laughs. “When you bring 5,000 teenagers into a hall, you’ve got your hands full, that’s for sure.”

Mind you, the Republican presidential primary debate, held at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center Jan. 10, was no piece of cake. Edwards and his team at the convention center were given only three months prior notice to get the site prepared. That meant not only being expected to accommodate the candidates and their supporters, but also the inevitable crush of media from around the world.

“Probably the biggest thing we had to do for the debate was upgrade the entire electrical system,” Edwards says. “We had to bring in portable truck-mounted generators to supply all the electricity for the event. They wanted to use about twice the amount of electricity that we normally use for almost any other show.”

The hall also had to add a dedicated uninterrupted power circuit as a failsafe device, just in case some disaster struck in the middle of the debate. As Edwards puts it, “We didn’t want a squirrel running down the light line and shutting the whole show down.”

The Myrtle Beach debate had no such problems, thanks in part to meticulous planning upfront. With such a short time to prepare for the event, the convention team put other projects on a fast track to get them completed well before the debate. Security procedures had to be checked and rechecked.

Accommodating the media and its technology turned out to be a monumental task in itself. Convention center staff installed an estimated 57,000 pounds of audiovisual equipment into the ceiling of the facility to lash the network together.

The national cheerleading competition was just as challenging in its own way.

Sure, the convention staff didn’t have the pressure of having the eyes of the world’s media on them, nor the worries about Secret Service security and the tons of media equipment being strung through the hall. But boy, those cheerleaders can be a handful.

“When you bring in thousands of screaming teenagers into a facility, it’s a lot more work,” Edwards says. “And afterwards, there’s a lot more impact on the facility, so it’s more trouble.”

In the end, both the presidential debate and the cheerleading competition went off without a hitch.

“With all the attention, we got to show the world a side of Myrtle Beach that maybe they’d never seen before,” Edwards says. “That made the whole thing worthwhile.”