League Organizer's Conference

This past weekend I attended the UPA’s biennial league organizer’s conference. League organizers from all over the country were in attendance. The event, which was hosted and paid for by the UPA, was a terrific opportunity for league organizers to get together, see what other leagues were doing successfully, trade ideas and tips, and get to know one another.

The sessions ranged from topics such as tips for securing fields and sponsorships, to strategies for recruiting women in leagues, to starting a youth league or teaching introductory skills, to methods for collaboration in decision-making and persuasive communication. I think I learned something at every session I attended (unfortunately there were so many sessions that they had to be split up and run in tandem with each other). The effort and enthusiasm that everyone brought to the conference – both presenters and attendees – was truly inspiring. Angela Lumpkin, a nationally renowned sports educator and basketball coach, gave the keynote speech. She spoke about the power of sportsmanship, and her take, as an outsider, on the uniqueness of Ultimate and of Spirit of the Game.

In addition to facilitating interaction between leagues, the conference was also an opportunity for the UPA to try to get a sense from the leagues of what types of programs and services they were most interested in obtaining from a potential affiliation relationship with the UPA. The UPA has committed to developing a league affiliation program, that is, a way in which leagues can have some sort of official relationship with the UPA that confers benefits to both parties.

Some of the seemingly most popular ideas that were thrown out in our brainstorming session at the conference were that the UPA should provide the following:

- a repository for league best practices and ideas/information (e.g., how to start a youth league, how to get fields, how to find sponsorship, etc)
- packaged (and customizable) software for league registration/organization
- comprehensive insurance (at “whole-sale” cost associated with packaging the demand)
- assistance (monetary or otherwise) with program development and discounted access to UPA resources
- getting UPA “branding” and legitimacy for communication with sponsors and government agencies

In addition, many of the league representatives indicated that they wanted to be able to avoid:
- having to charge league players full UPA membership fees
- having to deal with UPA-associated paperwork (registration/waivers)

The biggest potential advantage that such an affiliation program would have for the UPA would be:
- increased membership numbers for the UPA (and the associated benefits of being able to market the sport more effectively to potential sponsors, communicate with more players, etc)

Overall, it was a great first step. Now that we’ve got a pretty good idea of what types of benefits each side could obtain from such a partnership, we’ve got to put together some specific models of how this could work.

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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.