Jan '09 Board Meeting Recap

As the new president of the UPA board of directors, I'd like to thank you for reading the inaugural post on the new board of directors blog! We're hoping this will be a great way for people like you to feel like you have a better sense for who your board members are, and what we spend our time doing/thinking about.

I'd like to use this first post to give a short recap on the recent board of directors annual meeting that took place over MLK weekend in January. To start off, we welcomed onto the board 3 new board members: Gwen Ambler, Seth Grossinger, and John Terry. It was great to see them jump right into the discussions!

Our first item of business at the meeting was a review of the strategic plan initiatives and 2008 goals. Amazingly, the staff (and volunteers) have accomplished over 90% of the goals that were set out for 2008 (as well as a few that had originally been slated for 2009), after first spending a chunk of time hiring new staff members to help out with the increased work load. You can see a list of the main 2008 strategic plan accomplishments here. Since a lot of the goals for the first year involved setting the groundwork for future initiatives, you can expect to see more visible changes in the next few years.

Speaking of more visible changes, after the SP update, we got an update on the college restructuring effort that's currently underway. For those of you who haven't kept up with it, we're in the process of a major restructuring of the college competitive series that will include, among other things, an increased number of divisions, a formalized regular season, and a new method for allocating bids to the College Championships. At this point, the college restructuring task force that met in December is busy preparing a couple of different proposals that will be publicized during the first quarter of 2009. Once they're publicized we'll be asking for your feedback so that we can choose which plan (or which components of each plan) are the most popular before we finalize them. These large-scale changes are slated for implementation in the 2010 college season (more minor changes to this year's college season have also recently been approved and include things like an increased number of teams at Nationals, change to the bid allocation, and potential for changes to what calls are made actively by Observers). You can read a lot more about the changes to the college series here.

On Saturday afternoon we held officer elections, and elected a new slate of officers (details on officer positions can be found here). I was particularly excited about the energy and interest board members had in holding officer positions, since these positions definitely take up a lot more time.

Most of the rest of the board meeting was taken up with proposals submitted to the board. Proposals are the mechanism by which anyone can suggest a change in UPA policy or procedures (click here for more information). We received a large number of proposals this year (larger than any I can recall), especially significant because of the large number of proposals received from non-UPA board/staff members. It was really awesome to see so many people getting involved! The proposals ranged from suggestions for how rules changes should be voted on, to changes to the college eligibility rules, to proposals for ways to increase board member communication with our constituents.

At the end of the day on Sunday we had our members meeting, which is a time where any UPA member can come in and ask questions of the board. Although the members meeting is often not attended by any members (although we do occasionally get some), this year Andy Lovseth from The Huddle came by and asked us a bunch of questions. We spent an hour answering his questions, and also got some great suggestions from him on ways to improve board member communication. You can read his write-up of the meeting here. One idea that we've decided to implement this year is to have more members meetings at our events in order to make it easier for members to attend (similar to the college forum we had at the Club Championships this past year). We're hoping to have a members meeting at each of our championship events (youth/college/club) as well as at some other non-championship events.

Monday, our last day, we spent the morning reviewing and approving the 2009 budget. After that, the last agenda item for the weekend was a board development session. We spent some time discussing ways in which we can increase board member productivity as well as ensure that we are governing effectively. We also discussed ways of improving board member communication with our constituents (I'll be writing more about that in my first President's article in the next issue of the UPA magazine).

Overall, it was an extremely productive board meeting. I think everyone left feeling excited about the upcoming year, and ready to work hard to improve the sport we love!

Until next time,
-Peri

You can post a message to the entire board by commenting here (comments will not be publicly viewable, but will be read by the board), or feel free to send me an email about this or anything else at peri.kurshan@upa.org.