Eagan Wave Soccer Club Board Meeting April 9 th 2017

Transcription

1 I Call to Order Skip Newton called the meeting to order at 7:05pm. Members in attendance: Skip Newton, Shari Eckstrom, Amy Ryan, Bree Axelrod, Maria Hed, Mike Smith, Lakoda Will, Shannon Waldrop, Darlene Patyk, Susan K, Amy DuMond Kottke, Mai-Anh Kapanke, Marianne Keuhn, Jessica Kottke, Shawn Kottke, Shaji Varghese Absent: Nathan Krahn, Amy Kosnick II Approval of Meeting Minutes Shawn motioned to approve the March Meeting Minutes. Susan seconded and everyone approved. Google doc location: EWSC site location: III DOC Update College Opportunities The U17 Girls Premier team has travelled to 2 showcase tournaments, one in Phoenix and one in Las Vegas. Many colleges are showing interest in our players, e.g. the goalkeeper was recruited in Las Vegas. Obviously there is lots of opportunity for Eagan players to move to the next level. Shari may host a parent meeting for older players to advise them of what is involved and of how to make the most of their players potential. Coach Update Shari is hosting a coach meeting this week. She has already met with coaches who may move from other clubs to EWSC, so she is excited for our coaching culture to move onwards and upwards. The last Academy training (boys) will be tomorrow. Coach pre-season Evaluation Tomorrow Shari will send out a survey to seek feedback on Academy Training and to advertise a flash store. Mai-Anh mentioned that her coach provided a pre-season evaluation which included grades for attendance (e.g. D), and that he has talked about docking playing time when the season starts, based on pre-season performance. Some parents objected to this because they have multi-sport kids who cannot focus on soccer during the pre-season. There was confusion amongst the parents as to whether this message was coming from the coach, personally, or from the Club overall. Shari explained that this is a Club message, but it could be delivered differently, e.g. one-on-one between coach and player, rather than a paper hand-out. Mai-Anh explained that this evaluation happened during the season last year, but this year it seems to have moved up to pre-season, and we need to improve communication. Skip and Mike described the difficulty for coaches in evaluating players who have not attended as many events and practices as often as other players on the team. Skip recommended that parents and coach could have a discussion around how to ramp up their player for the soccer season when the other sports end. Shari is fully supportive of multi-sport athletes, but she expects them to work very hard to earn and keep their spot, and to manage the transition as best they can. They cannot give up, they need to step it up to make up for the time that they missed with their team during the pre-season. Skip agrees that lack of Academy attendance could impact playing time during the season, especially at C1 level, and older age levels, simply because the players will be at different ability levels, and we should not have to state this to our membership. Mai-Anh feels that over-communicating this message might be acceptable to avoid parent confusion. 1

2 Goalkeeper training Shari has added 2 new GK trainers and anyone can attend the sessions on Thursdays pm. Around 20 players came last week, which is more than we ve had in years. Shari has plans to increase opportunities for GK training during the summer and she will welcome our input and ideas for how to keep moving forward with GK training. Tryouts Shari and team met about Tryout registration. The biggest change this year is the inclusion of the Fall season on the Registration form. This should help with families who miss out on Fall play because they are not aware of the timelines around the Fall season. The registration form will now offer two seasons - January to July (Summer) or August through October (Fall). Every registrant will need to select one or both. We may even offer a better price for selecting both. Registration will open in May. Shari s goal is to be one of the first clubs to open Registration, in order to recruit as many players as possible. Uniforms Shari has been working on selection of our new uniform which will launch in Spring On the white uniforms the numbers will now be blue (due to referees having issues identifying the white numbers on the current white jerseys), with blue shorts and blue socks, with an option of white shorts and socks. A training shirt may also be included in the package, and a red kit for Keepers. The new jacket will be either full-zip or half-zip. Susan and Jess recommended that we ask Planet Soccer to embroider names and numbers on the new uniform jerseys and jackets rather than screen-print, to prevent them falling off. Shari took that into consideration and she advised that families can bring bad uniforms to Planet Soccer to be fixed. We need to figure out how we manage new incoming players this Fall who would play just one season in the current uniform. A sub-committee was formed to help with these decisions - U9s and U10s have more incoming players, so should the entire team change? Shari needs to tell Planet Soccer as soon as possible. Shari has been offered an attractive package to lock in with Nike for a 4 year deal for uniforms (2 cycles) and apparel. There is not a huge incentive price-wise, but the partnership with Nike will offer many intangible benefits. Shari will arrange a meeting to discuss the new tryout process as we have not yet resolved some of the questions brought up in the March Board meeting. IV Marketing Update There is a Tryout ad in the current issue of Soccer Times and the next one will be in the July edition. Our EWSC Tube Channel has been launched, 2,500 views so far, not many postings just yet. Facebook traffic and activity is increasing all the time. Please invite your friends to follow EWSC. We only have 500 followers, but other clubs have up to 1,500. There is lots of interest in apparel for the tournament can start ordering tomorrow. Amy is planning the BCBS kick-off event to make families aware of all of our programs, to dispel misconceptions families may have about competitive soccer and to encourage players to move to the next stage of their development. It will be either on a Mon/Weds or Tues/Thurs, the week of May 29 th. Shari, Carlos and John will be there, and Board members and older players are welcome to attend, to talk to people, answer questions, and hand out flyers. Shari would like volunteers for this event, so she took some names and will send out the final dates when she has them. V Team Genius Team Genius is a new start-up company offering software to document Tryouts. Clubs can configure it themselves and it includes functionality such as: Criteria for evaluators Player Check-in 2

3 Assignment of jersey/pinny numbers Publish scores to be used by coaches Formulas to figure out tryout scores Assign percentage of score to be devoted to coach evaluation of player versus tryout score. The cost can be event-based, season-based, annual, etc. An annual subscription with renewals allows for tracking of player history. Skip feels that it is an impressive platform, and Shari also had a demo and loves it. The cost for a package offering unlimited events for twelve months for a club of our size (up to 1000 players) would be $2750. They are a Twin Cities based company who are currently negotiating with Eagan Baseball, and already work with a hockey club in Canada and in Europe and a couple of smaller soccer clubs. Shari can envision uses for the software in addition to Tryouts, e.g. storing and maintaining coach evaluation of players. Skip also thinks that we could use it for Shari s evaluations of coaches, and there may be other scenarios for use that we have not even thought of. It is integrated with NGin for loading player details, but not yet integrated with Team Snap. Teams can be assigned in the tool, and communicated directly to coaches, families, etc. Right now we d still have to manually load the teams into Team Snap. It would be useful as an additional tool to communicate with teams as well as posting the teams on the website we could do an blast via Team Genius. Mai-Anh asked if we could pilot it for one event, e.g. in July 2017 for Tryouts, to ensure that we feel that we can make full use of the software and obtain the best value for our investment. Darlene felt that Team Genius would save all the manual time that is spent compiling and double-checking scores, and removes the room for error. Mike asked if we can build in other events, e.g. Academy Training and the answer is Yes with the annual package. Skip is awaiting some answers about expected SLA, success of load testing, site uptime and support and if they would consider change-freezes during our Tryout and Team formation period to ensure a stable/smooth experience during Tryouts. Shawn advised that we didn t budget for it this year, but if the Board approves it, we can afford to pay for it. It would cost $2000 if we chose to use it just for this year s Tryouts. Obviously it is much better value to purchase the $2750 annual package. Mai-Anh requested that we stipulate in the contract that if we don t have a good experience with the program during 2017 Tryouts, we can obtain a refund. Skip made a motion to move forward with spending up to $2750 for a one-year unlimited event subscription to Team Genius. Shawn seconded and everyone approved. VI Tournament Update 182 teams have registered, this time last year we had 160. Our regional marketing has paid off we have 9 teams from Mason City (last year they registered just 2 teams) and 10 from Brainerd. Registration will close on April 23 rd and at that point Amy will identify the remaining brackets to be filled (she likes 5 or 6-team brackets depending on the age group). Right now all age groups are looking very solid, and older age groups have really improved. Apparel will be offered via the online store through the end of April. After April we have to buy all leftover inventory for onsite sales. Amy is not concerned about this because last year we only had 36 pieces leftover. Last year we had no way to track the apparel sales at each concession stand onsite. This year we can do this, via credit card sales, so we can allow apparel sales at more than just Lex/Diff. Amy will need Board approval for this purchase. How much apparel she needs to buy will depend on how many online orders come in. Amy will send out an in early May. Amy confirmed Board approval of the purchase of a big screen TV (from Sam s Club) as our biggest ticket item of the basket raffle. No need for a motion, it s already in the budget. Sponsorship Committee is doing great work, they have solicited Orange Theory as a $2500 sponsor. They will bring in a rowing machine and run fun competitions for kids and adults. The Urgent Room is our $10k premier sponsor and we have about 10 x $300 field sponsors, our hotel sponsor Marriott and our bus sponsor Northfield Lines for EWSC transportation. The FST Committee is putting together a volunteer handbook to hand out to volunteers so that they don t need to call Amy when they arrive for their shift. VII Minnesota United Game 3

4 Skip is firming up details of the May 21 st pre-game event at Blarney in Dinkytown. EWSC will pay for food and non-alcoholic drinks. Skip will communicate both the ticket purchase site and the pre-game event to membership this week. The game starts at 4pm and pre-game event start-time is TBD. VIII Delinquent Payments Certain teams are having issues where credit cards are being declined during automated payment of fees, and the cardholder is not responding to s from their team manager. Mike S is involved where the Team Manager has come back and advised of an issue. The EWSC policy is that we pull the player pass if payment is not made within a certain amount of time. Mike said that there are about 2-3 instances per season where we talk about pulling the player pass and we have never actually needed to pull it yet. A bigger and as-yet-unresolved problem is when a player quits and the rest of the team has to come up with additional money to cover tournaments, etc. Mai-Anh suggested that we use the scholarship fund to cover the needed fees so that the other families or the Team Manager don t have to cover it. This issue was not resolved. IX Rec Update We are at 890 registrations in 82 teams. The Summer program is totally full and no more spots available, with about 6 on waitlist. Amy and Bree sent out an to membership about the single-color uniforms and received a handful of negative responses. In general the response was positive. Families were concerned about finding their field on BCBS (they used to use their team color), so new field signs are being made and will be communicated. Mike suggested that we post the schedule on the fields, and Bree explained that the schedule is available online. We have to remember that this change will save $1000 per year, and countless hours of labor. 75 players registered for Academy. Bree really feels that the Rec leadership position needs more support at certain times of the year for one month twice per year there is too much work for three people to handle. Skip will talk to EAA about seeking help. Amy recommended that it would be good if it could be the same person helping throughout the year. X Referees Update Shaji recommended that, with regard to same-color uniform shirts in Rec, the Rec team should purchase child-sized pinnies because the adult ones are too big and referees see players trip up over them on the field. Referee orientation is coming up later in April on 18 th and 20 th for anyone who wishes to be a referee. Amy asked about EWSC teams who bring older siblings to the tournament who may be available to help with refereeing that day, and Shaji will send her the details of referee training to help with questions she might get. They can take MYSA training later. EWSC is still hiring referees. XI Registrar Update Darlene is working on obtaining player birth certs and photos. She is still missing 11 birth certs and 10 pictures (5 are new players). When she finishes this for the Competitive program she will start working on U8 academy because she needs this information to print their player passes for FST. Darlene is working on Competitive program registration. 19 players are currently being assessed by Shari, or waiting for families to commit, etc. Darlene is verifying rosters with Jess. It takes 2-3 hrs to cross-check our master roster, Affinity Sports and Team Smap. 4

5 Darlene is working on FST registration. We have been having issues with payments so Darlene is working with Affinity Sports. On Thursday, April 13 there will be required PACT Training at Black Hawk Middle School (MPR) from 6:30-8:45 pm. 68 people are registered including 42 from Eagan and 15 with no club affiliation. We have 116 families who have not yet completed PACT Training (down from 131). It is taking a lot of Darlene s time to track these items. Dibs will open a week from tomorrow. Darlene and Amy still have to review the list of volunteer shifts, and she will ensure that State Cup families get to do their Dibs first. We ll close Dibs right before FST schedules come out. We are going to add an information statement to the sign-up to advise families where each age group may be playing, to help them choose their shift. XII Adjournment Motion to Adjourn: Skip Seconded: Shawn The meeting was adjourned at 8.37pm Next Board meeting is Sunday May 7 th. 5