I Call to Order Skip Newton called the meeting to order at approx. 7:00pm. Members in attendance: Shari Eckstrom, Darlene Patyk, Shawn Kottke, Shannon Waldrop, Mai-Anh Kapanke, Dennis Billstrom, Nathan Krahn, John Zielinski, Alex Gohar, Jerome Cherel, Skip Newton, Maria Hed, Marianne Keuhn and Rich Segar. Absent: Mike Smith, Brad Weber, Amy Dumond-Kottke, Darla Rainford II Approval of Meeting Minutes Skip motioned to approve March, April, May, June Meeting Minutes. Per Alex s request, Maria has fixed the online Meeting Minutes (turned off track changes). Nathan seconded and everyone approved. 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 DOC Update (Shari) Shari is busy, on the field every day at camp and training sessions, a little behind with responding to email but hopes to start to delegate some tasks to Forrest and Carlos. a. Staff Positions Carlos is appointed as Director of Player Development. He has been with EWSC for 10 years and loves the program and has taken on some additional academy training. Forrest has taken on the following tasks: - Coaching U13 and older players. - Forrest will help to create coaching manuals that will include drills and tips for team formation. - He will also help recruit coaches at the older levels. - He will put together a fitness plan for the older age groups, including exercises that the players can do at home throughout the year. - Forrest will also help work through any coach issues that arise. Both positions are contracted through the end of the calendar year, as a trial basis before we address 2016. b. Player Evaluations Many coaches provided player evaluation assessments to each player and Shari is collecting them from the coaches right now. She will review all evaluations and use them during Tryouts. Shari will remind the coaches to complete their evaluations this week, and she will suggest that each coach should sit with each player (and a family member if desired) and go through the written evaluation. The coach contract requires that they provide two evaluations per season (written/verbal not specified). Shari will come up with a way to track this for next season, maybe ask the Team Managers to help. Marianne will add this to the list of Team Managers tasks. We discussed the process of obtaining and using feedback on the coaches, and Shawn suggested a midseason and end-of-season Survey Monkey to obtain parent feedback, and one question could be did your player receive a coach evaluation? Rich suggested requiring each coach to provide a player evaluation before their final check is released at the end of each season. Shari will consider requesting help from Carlos or Forrest to work with the coaches on this. Dennis suggested making it an electronic process (and to review a printed version with the player and family members). c. Tryouts 1
6 evaluators have been appointed for Tryouts. The same evaluators will attend each Tryout session, unless an evaluator has a child in a session, in which case the evaluator will excuse themselves from that session and it will run with 5 evaluators. Players will be assessed in four areas: Technical Tactical Psychological Athletic Each session will start with sprints and fitness, then technical work (touches, cone dribbling), then play for 20 minutes, shuffle the players and finish up with play for another 20 minutes. Nathan asked if Shari s team needs help from the Board with coordination each day. Darlene confirmed that every volunteer spot is filled for Tryouts. She asked that the Board members could be on call in case she realizes at the last minute that she needs help. Shari and Darlene advised that there is no way to do uniform sizing at the Tryouts. d. Camps Camp size is the highest it has been ever for summer camps up to 70 kids at some sessions. The kids are making new friends, they are enjoying learning new skills, and they grow a lot from the beginning to the end of the week. e. Uniform The new Nike uniform has been agreed upon and it will consist of two jerseys (white with blue stripes and blue with white stripes), blue jacket, black shorts and two pairs of black socks. This is estimated to cost $155, including the jacket (previous uniform without jacket cost $85). Alex asked if we could consider offering two packages, one with a jacket and one without, given that many families have recently purchased the current jacket. Optional pieces include white shorts, white socks, blue socks, and training pants and the Goalie jersey is green. We ll have slides and printouts to show at Tryouts and parent meeting, and it will be posted on Facebook and the EWSC site. The jersey will be available for fittings in winter, the company will come out and we ll try them on at Rosemount Dome. Nathan raised concerns around new kids joining in Fall who might not want to purchase a uniform for the short Fall season since they won t be able to use it in 2016, especially for incoming U9s who don t have a uniform already. Shari confirmed that there is a lot of inventory on the existing uniform and she will check on the sizes available. If jerseys are not available, Shari said that tee-shirts will be used. Skip mentioned that we might want to consider adding scholarship for a portion of the new uniform cost and Shari has ideas to make this happen. f. Coaches A parent asked if we are going to list the coaches of each team before tryouts, and the answer is No. Shari is looking for about 10 coaches at the moment because we will have some open positions in Fall. She will put together a list of what she needs and send it out to the Board. Some of the qualities she is looking for include: Strong communication skills Willingness to arrive early at practice sessions to work with an individual child Good preparation and planning before each practice session and game Being professional both on and off the field as a role model and mentor for the children and also servicing the families. Shari wants to work in collaboration with the coaches, be a resource for them to use, and for coaches to enjoy being part of EWSC. She also sees opportunities for some of the older players to start training as coaches and helping out with the younger teams. III Registrar/Admin Update (Darlene) a. Registration 2
Fall competitive registration is up by 27 players in comparison to last year and we expect to meet the Fall goals. Summer competitive registration is a little low in comparison to last year, but these numbers are normal and Darlene expects 20 or 30 registrations per day this week. b. Volunteer fees Melinda and Darlene see a strong need to raise the fees, due to the no-show rate at the Tournament and the problems experienced by Team Managers in finding volunteers. 80-90% of our volunteers are used at the Future Stars tournament. Out of 594 volunteer registrations, 76 checks were cashed and no families called to complain after their checks were cashed. We budgeted that just 28 volunteers would not fulfill their shift. Darlene confirmed that the biggest headache is tracking the volunteer hours at the end (it was noted that raising the fee won t change this), and how to manage if someone doesn t turn up at the event and the volunteer committee has to scramble to find someone else to cover their shift. Marianne asked if we could look at the percentage of families who are not volunteering and address the issue at that level. We discussed how to encourage more families to sign-up to volunteer and to either fulfill their volunteer hours or find/pay someone to cover for them. Mai-Anh raised the concern that this is a volunteer club, we rely on families to be involved and increasing the volunteer fee would be one way to encourage them to become involved. Darlene reminded us that we don t cash the check if they volunteer, so nobody is down money if they honor their promise. Skip suggested that we could go to other EAA clubs and request them to work at our events and be paid for it. They could use it as fund-raiser. Skip mentioned that even though we won t know the exact numbers needed until a week before, we do know that there will be a need so we should go ahead and hire people. Dennis raised concerns about increasing our fees and staying competitive with other clubs. Rich doesn t feel that families put their highest priority on the fees; their strongest concerns are around coaching quality how much their child is learning. Rich suggested that we create a target of, e.g. 15% of volunteers not showing up, and we raise the fee to $150 from $100. Skip would like a sub-committee to work on coming up with a process/tool to use for tracking and scheduling of volunteers and he suggested that we focus today on making the decision around the fee it s currently $100, proposed is $200, and Rich suggested $150. Marianne noted that we also need to resolve a couple of other questions family maximums and how to manage situations where multiple-job families just cannot spare the hours to volunteer. Perhaps these items could be assigned to the subcommittee to work through. Nathan offered to lead this sub-committee, and Marianne and Dennis offered to join it. Skip said that either Melinda or Darlene should also be on it. Marianne proposed that we update the terms and conditions on the Registration section of the website to state that the volunteer fee is $150 and additional restrictions may apply. We also need to do a better job of communicating that if you sign up for a slot, you need to either be there yourself or find someone to turn up for your slot if you can t; no-show is not an option. Motion: Update the volunteer fee from $100 to $150, update the website and Bylaws accordingly, and communicate to parents this week at the Tryout meetings. Motion proposed by Mai-Anh. Motion seconded by Rich. Motion was passed with all in favor with the exception of Jerome, who voted against. IV Rec Update (Jerome) We are lower by 85 than this time last year, especially in 3 rd and 4 th grade boys and girls. Also low in pre- K registrations, high overall in boys registration, especially 5-8 th grade boys and girls. July 2015 has been 3
slow in registration, but June 2015 was similar to last year. Last we closed Registration early because we reached our numbers. We forecasted and purchased 950 jerseys, and we expect to keep registration open a bit longer in order to facilitate last-minute requests, even after the season starts. V Events (Dennis) a. FC United Event Dennis said that sales have been slow even though it has been publicized through the Team Managers. We still have 50 more tickets to sell. Skip expects that we might see some late pick-up. Dennis has flyers to hand-out at the Parent meetings and at Tryouts. Mai-Anh said that an email blast will be sent to both Rec and Competitive families in early August. b. Community Service / Above and Beyond awards This program started last year because a U13 team helped out during a teammate s family illness situation and the entire team was recognized and awarded with a pin at the high school soccer game in September. Dennis suggested that we keep this concept going, and we work hard to recognize volunteerism in the form of awarding: - An Above and Beyond Team of volunteers - An individual volunteer, who could be Team Manager Coach Player An email was sent out to the Team Managers a couple of weeks ago to recommend their teams for the team award, but nothing has been heard yet and no nominations received thus far. We decided that this was either due to lack of promotion of the concept or the possibility that no teams have been involved in any note-worthy volunteering this season. We discussed how to promote it: - John suggested that we advertise it on the website and talk about it at the Parent Meetings. - Dennis suggested an email blast to membership. - Marianne suggested we include it in the Weekly Update. - Shawn mentioned that the awards will be given on September 15 th, so we could accept nominations all the way through August. The same web form could be written to include both the Above and Beyond Team award, and the Individual volunteer award. - Rich suggested that we could look at the existing MYSA awards, and consider mirroring their structure. We could figure out how to establish awards for individual volunteers, and maybe we don t work on the team volunteer award but instead each year if we see a team or group who has done something very special, we recognize this team. - Nathan thinks it would work well to keep it as flexible as possible, for example, if we hear of a team who is doing something very special then we recognize them, but we don t force it year after year because we just might not have any team candidates each year. - Mai-Anh reminded us that this is a very busy time of year for the Club, and it is hard to expect people to absorb all of the information that we are sending. We need to be careful about how we schedule notifications like this. - Nathan suggested that we open up a part of the website to allow for the recording of this information, e.g. allow members to nominate volunteers and publish their stories online. - Mai-Anh volunteered to work with Darla to get this information out there on the website. Skip agreed that these are great ideas, we just need to formulate them into a program that can easily be implemented. Rich suggested that, in the short-term, we should nominate one person for the Individual award this year, and we expand the program for next year. III Other Business Skip asked us to keep in mind that coming up in the second half of this year we will have re-election for the following positions: - Vice President 4
- Marketing Director - Director at Large - Rec Director - Rec Technical Director - Fields Director - Volunteer Coordinator Rich suggested that we mention these upcoming open positions at the Parent Meetings this week. V Adjournment Motion to Adjourn: Skip Seconded: Shawn The meeting was adjourned at 8.38pm 5