I Call to Order Skip called the meeting to order at approximately 7.04pm. Members in attendance: Shari Eckstrom, Skip Newton, Shaji Varghese, Mai Anh Kapanke, Amy Dumond-Kottke, Dennis Billstrom, Susan Kolehmainen, Amy Ryan, Bree Axelrod, Jerome Cherel, Darlene Patyk, Shawn Kottke, Shannon Waldrop, Nathan Krahn, Marianne Keuhn, Maria Hed. Absent: Mike Smith II Approval of March Meeting Minutes Skip motioned to approve March meeting minutes. Shaji seconded and everyone approved. Maria has uploaded the March Meeting Minutes to the EWSC site. Google doc location: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/?usp=docs_web EWSC site location: http://www.eagansoccer.org/page/show/96731-ewsc-board-minutes III Future Stars Tournament Update (Amy) 189 teams are registered and Amy is hoping for at least 30 more teams to register. Amy has found that registration for U14 and higher age groups has declined, and this is probably because Woodbury has moved their upper age tournament to be the same weekend as ours. We normally play 4 games on Thresher on Friday night, and we can move 2 of those games over to Inver Grove Heights if necessary due to the enhancements being made to Thresher fields this spring by City of Eagan. Signage is going well, Amy is using the same signage vendor as the Rec tournament and they are doing a good job. Apparel we need to communicate very strongly the change this year that it will be difficult to order apparel onsite. All orders must be made online before the tournament. This is because we did not meet the minimum number of pre-orders to allow for a certain amount of onsite options. Mai-Anh suggested placing a table at the other sites, with pre-printed shirts, to cater for families of younger kids who are not playing at Lex-Diff, and if these families wanted to personalize their shirts they could stop by Lex-Diff. Dibs is going well. Approximately 18 families want to forfeit their volunteer hours, which is a lot less than last year. This may be due to the increase in the volunteer deposit amount to $150. We expect that there will be more volunteers available than we have spots to fill. As a result, some families may be exempt from volunteer hours. Exemptions will be determined fairly, for example: some teams have two team managers so we will offer for the second team manager to be exempt. Some parents of older kids have volunteered for many previous years, so we will offer them exemptions. Marianne also recommended that we could exempt the paid coaches that are parents. Eagan Baseball is giving us golf carts and tables, and Eagan Lacrosse is giving us tables. Sponsorship Congratulations and thanks to Nathan for securing our $2,000 Lex/Diff site sponsor Fiesta Cancun Restaurant. Marriott is interested in becoming our premier hotel sponsor both for local tournaments and when playing out of state. They would like to become more involved with our Club activities. Nathan is now working on the $1,000 level site sponsorship. If anyone has any other leads to follow up on, Nathan can take this on (possibly Minnesota Orthodontics). Mai-Anh reported that our Premier sponsor The Urgency Room is very excited for the tournament. They will provide hand sanitizers, chap sticks and possibly bag tags for each registrant and they will donate extra ice packs for coaches and medics to use. They will come and check out the tournament as it is happening. They will give flyers to Mai-Anh and we will stock these at the medical stations. Amy requested small business cards for the EMTs to possibly hand out on the fields to parents while assessing an injured child. Check-in has moved from Northview to a conference room with Wi-Fi in Springhill Suites. 1
Amy asked for the Rec Plus teams to be reminded to have their player passes available at registration. Skip mentioned that at the last EAA meeting, the Eagan Convention and Visitor s Bureau presented the Eagan information packet that they offer to each EAA sport for their events. However, they would like to be the only provider of hotel information, so it won t work out for our tournament because we are working with Marriott. Amy will send out an email requesting Board member help during Tournament weekend. She would like one or more Board members at Registration. She would like us to wear our Board shirts all weekend. She would like Mike, Shari, Skip and one more Board member to hand out Championship tee-shirts at the Championship game sites - Lex-Diff, Rich Valley, Thresher and Ohmann. The job is to hand all tee-shirts to the coach, thank the coach for being there, make some nice comments about the team, and give tee-shirts to each coach to distribute to their individual teams. Shaji made a special request for Board members to let him know if they hear of a complaint about a particular referee so that he can go watch. He might not have his phone on hand, so try to find him or ask someone where he is. Tournament volunteers will all wear bright yellow construction vests with the EWSC logo. There is an issue at Thresher this year whereby only two fields are available because the two lower fields are being fixed. Starting on May 9 th, Thresher will have just two out of four fields available, so some Northview fields will be converted into two fields for the older age group. Another alternate field is Downer Park. The City will repaint and move the frames, with the nets on the frames. They have special equipment that protects the nets during moves. Shaji asked Amy to remind Clubs to bring their referees and their gear with them to the Tournament. Amy asked to use the laminator machine on Friday night, and Shannon said he has it at his house. Shannon is going to work on nets on April 30 th and May 1 st. He will need volunteers then. He may also need volunteers during the week of May 9 th to set up the fields for the season. Amy requested for volunteers to help with set-up starting at noon on Friday and Skip requested that as many volunteers as possible help with take-down after 6pm on Sunday 8 th. IV Referee Update from Shaji Referee orientation will be this coming Tuesday and Wednesday 19 th and 20 th of April. The entire state of MN has only 2100 referees signed up. This is an all-time low. Shaji would prefer experienced referees at this point, rather than brand new registrants. Registration to re-certify is available online. V DOC Update (Shari) Shari reported that all of the teams are in a good place, and she feels that communication with coaches is going well. Shari is also kept busy with parent questions. She has passed on the message to the coaches that she has very high expectations, and she follows up on every email and voicemail that she receives from parents. She is very eager to help coaches to get to the next level of their development, and give them useful resources and to kids to believe in themselves and to enjoy coming to play soccer. She is mentoring coaches, and working with a different coach each night of the week. Starting with the summer season, Shari is going to review team progress weekly and she will go out and help the coach if their team is not doing well during the season. Coach Happy Hour will be on Saturday evening 7 th May at Fiesta Cancun and Board members are invited also. Uniforms are looking great! Families are happy and the kids love them, especially the fact that they all get a jacket. Board apparel will soon be available Shari is working with Planet Soccer. Players are still being added for the Spring/Summer 2016 season and we are at 610 players now. There are few teams that need some players now, for example U14 girls, U10 girls and U16 boys need players. Skip requested that next year we identify these needs earlier and approach Rec 2
teams before Rec registration to ask if any of them are interested in trying the Competitive program. Darlene suggested that we ask Heather at EAA to put out an email. Rec Plus is starting up now Shari has met up with the Rec Plus coaches. She is going to meet with Amy and Bree to talk about standardizing communication, and maybe in fall looking at the option of pulling Rec Plus into the Competitive program. Treat them as two separate programs, in terms of communication but not fields, uniforms, etc. There are 13 Rec Plus teams this year (70 1 st graders, and 40+ 2 nd graders), compared to 4 Rec Plus teams last year! Shari knows that Rec Plus is a very important program, and she wants to come up with ideas of how to improve it. Shari has had many older kids requesting to become coaches and get coach training. VI Admin/Registrar Update (Darlene) 614 players are registered for Spring/Summer 2016 and with one possible additional player. One person has asked for a refund due to knee surgery and Darlene is going to request a doctor s note. May 2 nd is the intra-club transfer deadline. After then, we cannot transfer players. June 16 th is the new player deadline. After then we cannot add new players. Darlene has all but two teams who have handed in volunteer checks and picked up passes. Two passes are on hold due to not handing in volunteer checks and two teams have not paid their team fees. PACT training was held on Saturday, but quite a few people have not yet attended. We need to discuss the possible penalties we could impose for non-attendance. Approximately 64 families have not attended. Need to start to discuss the volunteer and community service projects assess the players who have contributed a lot, coach of the year, player of the year, create a committee to discuss and assess. Darlene will ask if MYSA has a nomination sheet that we could borrow and tweak. Dennis would be happy to start working on this with a committee. Darlene and Maria will help. VII Treasurer Update (Shawn) Marianne described the work that she, Shari, Darlene and Shawn have completed to propose new payment procedures for the competitive program, and she presented an update to our discussion of two meetings ago. She handed out a new proposed payment schedule for Spring Competitive players. The goal of this new plan is to take the majority of fee collections away from the team manager and have fees collected by the club. This is an effort to offload much of the financial management that Team Managers currently have to do into a payment plan that will include fees for Registration, Training, Coaches, Future Stars Tournament, etc. We need to solve some issues around team budgets which are causing difficulties for Team Managers and coaches. Team Managers are getting hit with complaints from families who paid their non-refundable $75 Tryout fee, and purchased uniforms, but were not prepared to be asked for additional money (e.g. coach fees, tournament registration) after the season started. Post-tryouts, rosters are sent out and families who do not opt out are committed to a team and charged the $75 registration fee. Shawn walked us through the proposal handout, which is designed for Spring/Summer season and not yet Fall. Nathan asked about how we would handle financial aid and scholarships. We would need to ensure that families understand the portion that EWSC can cover. In the past, it was easy to make this clear. We ll have to discuss that in more detail. Shannon asked whether there are any additional service charges due to moving to a plan. We expect that EAA will include these in the amount (e.g. credit card fees) they charge us each year per player. Mai-Anh asked how extra more time this will require on Shawn s part, and he reckons that it will not create much additional work. Skip raised the issue of sticker shock, and recommended that we communicate very clearly and frequently and that we prepare to answer many questions from parents. We can advise families 3
to track their previous payments on Team Snap and they ll see that we have not increased the fees. Instead we are just offering a different way to pay and removing the responsibility from Team Managers for collecting these fees. Mai-Anh recommended that when we post the payment plan details online, we add an FAQ section. Marianne made a motion to move forward with the Spring Summer 2017 payment plans as presented, and for the sub-committee to continue to work on FAQs. Mai-Nah seconded and everyone approved. VIII Rec and Rec plus Update (Bree and Amy) Jerome presented a follow-up to the item we discussed during our last Board meeting, whereby a parent emailed Bree and Amy with an observation that the 5-8 th grade girls team formation was rather skewed last year whereby one very strong team won almost every game. Jerome has documented 12-15 steps that coaches could take to mitigate these issues and to slow the play down. Jerome described an example around Three goal margin : If a team is up by three goals then the winning team removes a player. If the winning team is up by six goals, they remove a second player. If the margin decreases to five goals, then the winning team can bring their second player back. If the margin decreases to two goals, then the winning team can bring their first player back. Shaji explained that referees cannot enforce the rules. Referees don t call in the scores. This is done instead by coaches or field managers. Shaji asked for the enforcement to come from coaches. Jerome agreed that it should be the responsibility of the coaches to ensure that the lead does not increase too much. Rec rules will be updated to add a paragraph with Jerome s proposal. Jerome will send out his proposal via email to the Board and we may vote on it during our next meeting. Amy suggested creating a cheat sheet to provide to coaches. Jerome is resigning from the Board, after 2.5 years, and he feels that the Rec Program will be very safe in the capable hands of Amy and Bree. The Board thanked Jerome for all of his contributions and achievements, and acknowledged that he will be sorely missed. Rec Registration closed on 31 st March with 1,069 players. Requests are still coming in, but need to be turned down because there is just no room. Registration is up 14% year over year. 107 total teams formed, 94 are Rec, 13 are Rec Plus, which equates to 214 coaches to be recruited, signed-up, background-checked, uniforms ordered, etc. Schedules are up on the website, almost a month in advance of the season starting. Darla Rainsford completed this task in record time and incredibly efficiently. Upcoming notable dates: Coaches training 30 th April. St Mane night 3 rd May. Equipment pick up 4 th May. Rec season starts week of May 9 th Fall season opens 1 st June. IX Minnesota United FC (Dennis) 24 tickets sold so far. Dennis would like sales to increase and he would be happy to communicate directly with Team Managers. Dennis can pick up leftover Tournament food and beverages from the shed sometime after it s been counted there. The U15 Premier Team sent 1,000 jerseys down to Haiti and the Sanneh Foundation is very grateful. X Adjournment 4
Motion to Adjourn: Skip Seconded: Shawn All were in favor and the meeting was adjourned at 8.52pm. Next Meeting: Sunday May 22 nd. 5