Tag Archives: Volunteer Staff Director

This is the final of four posts in which I’m expanding on the four areas I listed on my candidate info sheet, which I think are crucial for USA Fencing  to address:

• Get our finances under control.
• Create and manage an appropriate and effective governance structure.
• Create a tournament calendar and structure appropriate to our fencer demographics.
• Become a “We” instead of a “They” organization.

These are not so much separate items, though, as different aspects of one gigantic puzzle. With the exception of the fourth item, which may well happen on its own as the other three are addressed (though I think there is much we can do deliberately in that direction as well), you make any major changes in one area and the others will be drastically affected.

So while I’m tackling each of these areas in separate posts, there will inevitably be some redundancy among them, because so much is so interrelated and interdependent.

Become a “We” instead of a “They” organization.

You can tell a lot about an organization by the pronouns people use to refer to it.

For all too many of its members, USFA is currently a They whose overriding goal is to wreck their competitive opportunities and ruin their lives.

• THEY make me fence in the same pool as my teammate, even though that’s how the rules say it’s supposed to work.
• THEY don’t book the flights referees want or pay officials on time.
• THEY create schedules with conflicts that make me choose between two events that I want to enter.
• THEY keep changing the rules.
• THEY won’t tell me when my event will be done so I can fly out on the same day I fence.
• THEY triple-flight my saber event or double-flight my foil or epee event so I have to spend too much time sitting around waiting.
• THEY keep holding tournaments in cities I don’t like in parts of the country I don’t like traveling to.
• THEY keep choosing hotels that are too expensive.
• THEY won’t let me fence in the championship just because I forgot to enter by the deadline.
• THEY keep assigning crappy referees to my pools.
• THEY make it too hard to figure out what the rules are.
• THEY won’t do what I think they should do.

It’s much easier to think of a dysfunctional organization as a disembodied entity acting maliciously against you. I’m not immune to the tendency—THEY’ve paid me much later than events I’ve worked, THEY’ve messed up my flight reservations, THEY’ve published schedules that were harder to run than they needed to be, THEY’ve changed the rules in ways that make tournaments more difficult to run.

But THEY are scores—even hundreds—of individuals. We’re a pretty typical subset of the general population—some highly accomplished, some less so, some passionate about making everything work better, others just trying to get by with the least possible effort. The problem with thinking of this eclectic group of individuals as a THEY is that an impersonal THEY is not something that can be changed or redesigned or improved. THEY can only be coped with or survived or avoided, and eventually it’s easier for the rest, the non-THEY, to give up hope of anything different, to decide that attempting anything else is a lost cause.

That’ll kill an organization fast.

Solving some of the problems I talked about in my previous three posts can help us become less of a THEY organization and more of the WE we need to be if we’re to survive our current muddle and thrive. We need to be more transparent and responsive as an organization, more competent and responsible. More than that, we need to develop an attitude, a sense of belonging among our members, a belief that we all have a part to play to improve USA Fencing, that we get the association we build together.

A former colleague in another nonprofit a couple of lifetimes ago was an absolute genius at making this happen. Someone would accost her, ranting about something or other they were unhappy about: “You people need to [do whatever was needed to handle whatever the problem was]!” My friend would ask a couple of questions, make a comment, and then ask one more question: “When do you plan to start working on that?” Somehow, without realizing how it happened, the infuriated ranter would find himself in charge of the project he’d not even realized he’d proposed.

We got some of our best volunteers that way.

But it only works when you’ve got a culture that enables participation, where the participants believe that what they can do will be valued and make a real difference. That’s the culture WE need to create.

This is the third of four posts in which I’m expanding on the four areas I listed on my candidate info sheet, which I think are crucial for USA Fencing  to address:

• Get our finances under control.
• Create and manage an appropriate and effective governance structure.
• Create a tournament calendar and structure appropriate to our fencer demographics.
• Become a “We” instead of a “They” organization.

These are not so much separate items, though, as different aspects of one gigantic puzzle. With the exception of the fourth item, which may well happen on its own as the other three are addressed (though I think there is much we can do deliberately in that direction as well), you make any major changes in one area and the others will be drastically affected.

So while I’m tackling each of these areas in separate posts, there will inevitably be some redundancy among them, because so much is so interrelated and interdependent.

Create a tournament calendar and structure appropriate to our fencer demographics.

This is an easy post for me to write. I’ve worked a lot of tournaments in the last 15 years—local club  and circuit events, divisional qualifiers, section championships, regional events, and national events. I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t at each level, and I’ve had plenty of time to think about how we could improve almost every aspect of our tournaments, and along with that time, plenty of fencing people to bounce those ideas around with. We’ve changed a lot in how we run tournaments: some of those changes are obvious, like the change of software to Fencing Time or the standardization of venue layouts to pods of 4 strips. Others, like changes to BC internal procedures for managing events, are mostly invisible to competitors.

This is also a difficult post to write. I’ve fairly firm opinions about changes we still need, and I’ve more than a few victims who’ve asked me a simple question about tournaments and been inflicted with a lengthy lecture in response. Once you get me started on tournaments, I can go on for hours, a phenomenon with which several of my tournament roommates are familiar. (At least they are usually BC people, who tend to do the same.)

Since it’s no secret that I think our national events are too big, I’m not going to spend any time rehashing what I’ve written before here and here and here and even here, for example. Instead, I’m going to list some of the things we can’t do because our national tournaments are so large, and follow that up with a few ideas that we ought to be considering to replace our current tournament structure.

• Scheduled finals. I’ve lost track of the number of times we’ve attempted to schedule and showcase the final rounds of NAC and championship events. The idea is that with scheduled final bouts, the local organizing committee (LOC) or sports commission can promote the tournament to attract local sponsors and local spectators.  An LOC like that in Detroit could work wonders with scheduled finals to promote their local clubs and the sport in general. But with our huge events, we can’t reliably schedule finals at times convenient for local TV news crews, or when we do try to schedule finals, some minor early slowdown cascades through the day into a 2-hour delay. (Always makes me think of what a CHP friend told me years ago, about how a single car slowing 10 mph at the right time of day on the SF Bay Bridge can result in complete gridlock on the bridge a couple of hours later.)
• Training, part 1. You’d think giant tournaments would offer lots of opportunities for training new tournament personnel, but for BC, at least, it’s the other way around. Most of our trainees are familiar with basic tournament operations, so what they need is hands-on experience with national procedures. We’ve learned over the years, that trainees need to be additions to regular staff, so they can be paired with someone who they can observe and then be observed by. Our huge events, though, are so tightly scheduled that we can’t allow trainees the little bit of slack, the slight extra amount of time they need to do tasks themselves, and because of that cascade effect, we can’t afford to let them make what would be minor, relatively harmless errors at smaller tournaments.
• Training, part 2. At last season’s JOs board meeting, I presented a BC recruiting and development plan developed by a small group of experienced national BC staff, complete with timelines for developing training materials and workshops, a BC website, and lots of other useful goodies. We’ve not made much progress with it, though—far less than we’d expected to have completed by now. (Other areas within USFA have the same problem.) Why? Because the people with the knowledge and experience to do the work are the same people who work national events (and regional events and serve as division officers and regional tournament organizers and/or officials), and we’ve also got jobs and families and for some peculiar reason even take non-fencing vacation days now and then. If we could train more people, we ‘d have the time and energy to train more people.

Which brings me to tournament restructuring. The USFA is at the stage of its growth where we’ve got too many competitive members for our current tournament structure—too many entries to fit into our traditional number of national tournament days. What we need is a structure that we can grow with, so we won’t need to keep inventing a new structure every 15 or 20 years as the old one becomes too unwieldy. Some ideas I’d like to see us considering:

• A permanent national top level. This could be championships only or include a series of national tournaments like the current NACs. Either way, entry would be determined by points and limited to a predetermined number of competitors, ideally 160, which with an 80% promotion rate would result in a DE table of 128. This would make the schedule, staffing levels, and equipment needs predictable and consistent, and allow us to return to a whole range of venues we can no longer currently use because they are too small. This would also allow more effective promotion and showcasing of our top-level competitions, eventually even paying spectators eager to see our increasingly popular sport. As the sport grows, this top level would remain stable and adjustments to the tournament structure would be made at the intermediate and lower levels without necessitating a complete overhaul.
• True regionalization. Eventually, I think we’ll need to go to a true regional structure, similar to the way divisions and sections used to work. The current disparity in size and competitiveness of divisions (as well as the old sections) requires realignment with our current demographics, though. Given the size of the United States and the longer distances between fencing centers in many parts of the country, there will never be geographic parity throughout the country, but we can certainly do better than we do now at achieving some sort of competitive parity. Several sports use regional affiliate associations to create their structure—we need to investigate how other sport NGBs have negotiated this stage of growth.
• Tournament operations spun off from the national office? We should consider which tasks are best-suited for the national association to perform and which can be delegated to other entities. Both the ROCs and the SYCs are beginning to show that large NAC-size tournaments, with the proper standards and support, can be effectively organized independently. Eventually, we could bid out all national events to independent organizers and let the national organization concentrate on developing materials and resources to support the overall infrastructure of fencing—coaching development, club development, regional affiliate support (finances, website development, etc.). With the national organization providing guidance and resources, the divisions (or whatever lower level we have) could and should play a much larger role in identifying and developing new coaches and officials.

If we go to smaller national events, license tournaments to independent organizers as ROCs and SYCs are, or both, we’ll have to make up the revenue lost from tournaments fees, with an entry head tax, a percentage of tournament revenue, sponsorships and grants, or—more likely—some combination of all of these. Again, we should look to see how other NGBs generate their revenue.

Last in the series: “We versus Them“

In the Election Candidates thread over on fencing.net, several board candidates have responded to a question about what three things USA Fencing has done right and what three things they’ve done wrong over the past year. I’ve no lack of opinions but I find myself a bit put off by the form of the question—one of our continuing habits organizationally is to resort to the quick fix to handle a specific issue without addressing the more fundamental problems that create all those specific little issues in the first place. Making that quick list seems too much like the short-term mindset we’ve been falling back on for so many years.

Having said that, of course, I can refer you to my candidate info sheet, which contains a list of the four—that’s four, not just three (and five is right out!)— areas I think USA Fencing needs to address:

• Get our finances under control.
• Create and manage an appropriate and effective governance structure.
• Create a tournament calendar and structure appropriate to our fencer demographics.
• Become a “We” instead of a “They” organization.

These are not so much separate items, though, as different aspects of one gigantic puzzle. With the exception of the fourth item, which may well happen on its own as the other three are addressed (though I think there is much we can do deliberately in that direction as well), you make any major changes in one area and the others will be drastically affected.

So while I’m going to address each of these areas in separate posts, there will inevitably be some redundancy among them, because so much is so interrelated and interdependent.

Let’s start with the money:

Get our finances under control.

The USFA is in much better shape financially than I would have thought possible a year or more ago. Financial reports are more frequent, more understandable, and based on what I know of my own corner of the organization, more reliable. We’ve got a real finance director (and with Keri Byerts, one who knows  fencing!) and control processes now that are actually being used. But if I had to choose a single step that’s made a huge impact on both our finances and the attitude with which the board and staff approach our finances, it would be Sam Cheris’s approach to budget variances, which should not have had to be an innovation: any increased amount in one area must be offset by a decreased amount somewhere else.

Assuming we continue on the same track (not necessarily a safe assumption given our recent history), we should be operating on a stable financial basis within a year or two. But we need to be sure—since we are now in a world where we’re fielding complete teams instead of just a few athletes in a couple of weapons—that we plan our Olympic quadrennials carefully, so that we can fund our athletes properly for each Games and not dig ourselves into a Olympic-size financial hole as we have for the past few quads.

A financially stable NGB with a demonstrated ability to manage its spending becomes a much better target for grants and donations and sponsorships. I hope we continue the work we need to do to get there.

In a sense, our recent financial woes were caused by our success—and our failure to think about what that success means for the future. For too long we’ve focused on our year-to-year finances, or at best, a quad’s worth of budgeting. But think about our growth—while our competition entries have more than doubled in the last 15 years, we haven’t developed new referees or other officials at anywhere near the same rate. And what about coaches? The old Coaches College, the USFCA, and Michael Marx among them have provided some useful training to those already coaching, but they haven’t done much to increase the number of new coaches entering the sport.

Individual entries for SN in Columbus will be well over 7,000, even allowing for withdrawals and no-shows, and it’s entirely possible that entries for next year’s SN will be over 8,000 if we don’t change our tournament structure. We’ve already got a virtually inflexible schedule, with unavoidable conflicts in some weapons; if we wanted to bring Division I, either a NAC or the championship, back to SN, we’d have to either add days or drop other events. There’s not much that we can do with those numbers, aside from shaving a couple of minutes here and there by tweaking procedures.

Over the past two or three quads, as I and my predecessors warned of the consequences of our growth, a countervailing attitude was always that we shouldn’t worry—we should encourage more growth, because more members and more entries mean more revenue, and the more revenue the better. So now we’re locked into a revenue model under which our events are becoming more and more unmanageable while we need the income they generate. Our ability to manage tournaments in the best interests of our athletes is being seriously compromised by our revenue needs.

This cannot continue indefinitely. (I currently think the odds of our being able to create a workable schedule for the 2014 SN or to staff it once we have a schedule are no better than even.) What will we want USFA to be able to do in a decade or two, when our membership is 40,000 or 60,000? Will we still be running NACs? Championships only? Will we have spun off tournament operations to regional affiliates in order to focus on coaching education and  club development? Whatever we decide has implications for our revenue model, because we need to be able to fund whatever we decide we need to do.

More on these possibilities in my next few posts.

Next up: Governance