Yankee
Board Meeting Minutes
Monday,
July 7, 2003
Board
Attendees: Judy Katalina, Ann Riedl,
Joe Loyall, Debbie Finnigan, Lynn Jones, Paul Santos,
Helen Taylor
Other
Attendees: David Castanon, Glenn Corwin, Steve
Webster
Meeting
started at 6:55
This
was the first meeting of the new Executive Board. Each member introduced
him/herself. Judy gave a brief history of Yankee and discussed the
responsibilities of the board. She explained the relationship with NERVA. She
described the appointed Yankee positions. Judy introduced an idea of having
board liaisons for each appointed position.
Registrar
liaison: Ann Riedl (registrar: Judy Katalina)
Bookkeeper
liaison: Lora Loyall (bookkeeper: Dori Senerchia)
Web
editor liaison: Helen Taylor (web editor: Tom Sweeney)
Referee
Assignor liaison: Judy Katalina (referee assignor:
Glenn Corwin)
Newsletter
editor liaison: Joe Loyall (newsletter editor: TBD)
Ratings
chair liaison: Debbie Finnigan (ratings chair: Ann Riedl)
Each
board member should send e-mail to the appointed position holder informing that
he/she is his/her liaison to the board.
Secretary
Report (Joe)
·
We reviewed the minutes from the last meeting. Judy pointed out that
some detail was omitted from one of the items. The detail was in the notes from
the meeting and Joe will add it to the minutes. The minutes from the last
meeting were accepted with this change.
Treasurer's
report (Judy for Lora)
·
Judy handed out the income statement for last season. All of Yankee’s
income came from membership fees. We went into last year with retained earnings
from previous years of $44K. Last year we: Lost $3400 from championships; Lost money on Grass Roots scramble tournaments; Spent $24.5K
on gifts (jackets) for all members. In total, we lost $14K last year, with just
a couple of things not in the books yet (stipend for bookkeeper during the
second half of the season and one gym rental).
·
The board needs to start thinking about what
to fund this year, such as clinics.
·
Total membership this year ended at 1943. Last year we finished with
1703 members. This was the largest jump in years and the largest number of
members in Yankee since 1994.
·
Judy handed out a sheet detailing the ratings makeup of the membership
for 2003.
TD
report (Debbie)
·
Debbie doesn’t have the end-of-year numbers yet. She and Judy will put
this together.
Referee
report
·
Glenn Corwin is going to be the new referee assignor.
·
Glenn described how he is going to do things. He is going to have a few
requirements. First, tournaments need to be scheduled a month in advance (this
is not a problem for Yankee, but for girls JO). If a tournament is canceled or
reduced after Wednesday, the TD must still pay referees. E-mail is Glenn’s
preferred contact method. After Wednesday, he prefers that TDs
use the phone (i.e., no Friday night e-mails).
TDs and Refs can sign up for tournaments on
the web: refs to indicate the dates they are available, TDs
to say how many referees they need.
Glenn intends to have referee assignments sent out Monday night.
·
Steve Webster introduced some proposals for alternative referee
staffing programs. He explained that we have about 100 referees, with about 50
of them active on any given weekend. He is working on how we spread ourselves
thinner because on any given weekend, the referee assignor is working hard to
get enough referees.
·
The first proposal is to have a supervisory referee only at some
tournaments. That referee will work a reduced schedule and supervise the play
on all courts, with his primary being training and supervision. The work teams
will provide both R1 and R2 referees and they must be accredited. An accredited
referee will not need to be certified and will have no uniform requirements;
they will just need to pass the Referee Test C. Basically, the tournament will
have one referee and all the rest accredited player refs. Steve’s not sure
whether this will work at all levels and at all tournaments. Tournaments at the
draft will need to be designated either supervisory tournaments or regular
tournaments and, presumably, supervisory tournaments will be cheaper, since
accredited referees will not be paid.
·
Steve’s second option is to allow tournaments in which referees are
brought in to work only semifinals and finals. This could only happen with a
supervisory tournament.
·
We discussed whether to offer these options at the Fall
draft, when TDs can run friendship tournaments.
People will need time to take the exam. We decided to make it available at the Fall draft. Steve and Debbie will put together a note to
send out to the TDs.
·
Steve also has a proposal to raise referee fees. He says that more
referees are grumbling about low referee pay. Division I college referees get
$170/match for approximately 3 hours of work. Div. III college referees get
$100. High school referees get $81 for 2 matches (best 2 of 3) – max 6 games.
Steve handed out a proposal that he put together. We discussed Steve’s
proposal. One issue is escalating tournament costs. Steve’s proposal would cost
approximately $10 more per team. We discussed whether all referees should be
paid the same or whether better referees should be paid more. Steve agreed that
some regions pay their referees by their level of certification. He hasn’t
favored that because when he works a tournament, he is working side-by-side
with a lesser referee. The work is the same; the level isn’t different on the
court. Steve might do it better, but the work is the same. Steve explained that
he is expecting this to be a six year plan. He is not expecting a raise next
year or the year after (it has been four years since the last referee pay
raise).
NERVA
Report (David/Judy)
·
Yankee sent 65 teams to Nationals this year.
·
David explained that the National Board meets twice a year. It met at
Nationals in May. The National fiscal year is November to November (when we run
tournaments in September and October, we run under last year’s policies). The
National Board wants an on-line registration system, but they don’t have a
vendor or system yet.
·
The National Board would like everyone that coaches juniors to have the
equivalent of a background check. One issue is whether they have a vendor in
place to do the background check. If it happens, the region will pick up part
of the cost to get it in place at first. It will apply to coaches, club directors,
and anyone who oversees juniors. It won’t apply to referees, since they are at
events, not practices.
·
There is going to be a new national championship for the height
disadvantaged. The maximum height of players will be fixed and there will also
be an international championship. There is very strong support for this from
some countries and it will be a 2008 Olympic event, so the National Board is
following the international lead. The added national championship will probably
push out another existing championship, probably regular coed, which doesn’t
fill. We need to think about whether we want to offer tournaments and
championships at a height restricted level and how we would enforce it.
·
Helen asked whether we have any input into the single elimination format.
The bottom half teams faced single elimination on the third day. The Nationals
tournament organizers say that single elimination with a 7 team pool is similar
to double elimination with a 6 team pool in number of games played. One of the
problems is that the people that run the tournament are pretty disconnected
from the National Board. However, David says we have a lot of pull because of
our large number of entries, so he can take this issue back to the National
Board.
·
Other things David didn’t like: 7 team pools, back-to-back
matches. He thinks 6 team pools with
double elimination would have worked better.
Ratings
report
·
All re-rate letters have gone out. There were quite a few re-rates over
the summer.
·
Paul Bradford has resigned as men’s ratings chair. We need another
men’s rater and a ratings chair. We need someone that can be completely
unbiased. We also want to add a couple more Men’s raters. Brett Crandall has
volunteered to be men’s ratings chair. Other suggestions should be sent to
Judy.
·
We should also think about nominations for the ratings committees.
Nominations for Women raters should be sent to Ann. Nominations for Men raters
should be sent to Judy.
Newsletter
Report
·
Joshua was going to send a proposal for an on-line newsletter. In recent
years, the newsletter editor position has had high turnover. A question tabled
from last meeting was whether we could have an on-line newsletter and give
people an option to have a paper newsletter mailed to them.
·
We don’t have a paper newsletter editor right now, but have a couple of
people who are willing to give it a try. Joshua will do it if it is an on-line
version. One of the concerns is how many people will request a paper
newsletter. If it’s more than a few (say 200, which is approximately 10%) then
printing and mailing them can still be quite a large job. David estimated that
there are a few hundred people that do not use the web on a regular basis.
Managing the process of getting a paper newsletter to those that request it,
and only them, could be difficult. Steve asked whether we would have a website
with living content where, when an article comes in, it gets edited and put up
on the web? Or would it be a PDF newsletter, with a
deadline and a file goes up on the web?
·
Judy will take these questions to Joshua. We will need to send a letter
to all the members to indicate our intentions to do a web-based newsletter and,
if they want a paper copy, to send back a US Mail address.
Web
editor Report (Tom Sweeney via e-mail)
·
The summer schedule is up and on-line.
·
Tom has just completed the work on making the PAVO and USAV Referee
Test A accessible from the web. Refs who are
certified by both organizations will be able to take both tests at once on-line
or they can take them individually. The test itself is being hosted at the
PAVO web site and we'll have a link to it from ours.
·
Tom will be working on the Test C and Test D versions (new referees and
JO referees) over the summer and we'll be hosting those on our site again.
Looks like more regions will be signing up to use the test system again this
year. In addition, we'll also be doing the Scorekeeper test. NERVA has
been receiving income from the referee tests that Tom has put on line. We get
money for each test. The tests are graded automatically. This money has been
used for new training programs and clinicians.
·
Over the summer Tom plans to do some administrative cleaning of the
site, and might work on a redesign of the homepage. Glenn Corwin and Chris Lanfear have created a nifty new logo for NERVA. It's
a sharper image of the old one (NE imposed over a volleyball) that is red,
white and blue with 6 stars in it to represent each of our states.
·
Steve Webster has made some requests for cleaning up the referee web
page a bit, and for adding some new functionality. Tom will be tackling
that this summer as time permits.
·
In the two years that we've been at the new site, we've taken 86,000
hits to the main page, and a bunch more to pages under the covers.
Qualifier/Championship Report (Tom Sweeney via
e-mail)
·
Championships went pretty smoothly. There was some finding more
gyms due to space and cancellation problems, but swapping out of teams/dates
was kept to a minimum. The vast majority of teams that requested a date
got it.
·
There wasn’t much feedback – positive or negative – on this year’s
championship process. The biggest complaint was about having to write new
checks for the qualifiers. There were also a few grumbles about the team
qualification criteria for the championships.
·
We had a big increase in teams at the Men’s and Coed levels over last
year, a slight increase over last year for the Women’s side, and possibly the
most teams ever that participated. 338 total teams participated this
year. That's up from 278 last year, and 305 the year before. Men were 127
teams, up from 96. Women were 89 teams, up from 82. Coed were 122 teams, up
from 92. Most levels at least matched last years
numbers. A few sank: Men’s BB went from 12 teams last year to 11 this
year. Women’s C+ surprisingly went from 25 teams last year to 19 this
year. Neither the Women’s C or B levels changed
significantly as one would expect. All of the coeds went up by 3 or 4
teams with the exception of the B level, which went up by 8 teams. Since
it was only 15 teams last year, that was a pretty big
jump. The big gainers this year were the Men’s C and C+ with the C going from
19 to 34 teams and C+ going from 20 to 30 teams.
Old/New Business:
Grass Roots Committee/Scramble Tournaments
·
Joe will add a GRC report to the agenda for each meeting from now on.
·
We have offered a free first round pick for each date a gym is offered
for scrambles.
·
We discussed whether we should have T-shirts and whether they should be
numbered. Judy is going to contact the guy who does the T-shirts. We decided
the shirts should be numbered and they should be given to everyone that plays.
We also discussed how much we should charge for scrambles. Debbie will run some
numbers and figure this out.
Extra jackets
·
We have about 150 extra jackets from the
Yankee gifts last year. We discussed what to do them. A couple of ideas were to
give them to new members at scramble tournaments or give them as prizes.
Tournament Draft
·
The tournament draft will be Friday, September 5, 7 pm, at LSHS. The first tournament will be September 13.
·
We should send out a message to the Yankee TDs
after the draft is announced, asking for contact information to be sent before
the draft.
TD
Suspension
·
A tournament director who was on probation this season was consistently
late with membership forms, week after week, and as much as a month late. He
would also put rosters on the wall with no numbers. As both of these are
violations of his probation, he has been suspended from running tournaments for
this coming season (fall and spring). The letter has gone out but Judy hasn’t
heard back from him.
·
Another TD, who sometimes runs tournaments for the suspended TD, was
put on probation for the coming season (fall and spring).
·
In another incident, at a Men’s BB qualifier in early April, a player
gave this TD a check made out to Yankee for championships, in case his team
qualified. The TD cashed it and deposited it into his account. The player wrote
another check to Yankee for the championship. Judy has repeatedly asked the TD
to pay the player back for the last 6 weeks. The TD keeps saying he will do
this but it has not happened yet.
We
tabled a number of items until the next meeting:
·
Change in personal ratings to coincide with tournament names
·
Championships for next year
·
Proposal for TD responsibilities and a late policy. Debbie sent out a
proposal.
·
Reviewing the Yankee Rules & Policies. Board members need to read
the R&P.
·
Reviewing the appointed positions and stipends. Judy will send out a
list.
·
Reviewing the numbers of teams allowed at levels for the upcoming draft
and whether women should still count as a whole point toward Coeds. Debbie will
put together a report on tournaments, levels, etc.
·
Getting rid of the 10 foot attack at Coeds B level and above.
Next meeting, Tuesday, August 19 at LS.