The biggest question of the day has to be "WHY IS THERE SUCH A RUSH TO MAKE SUCH A DRASTIC CHANGE?" The only answer I can come up with is that someone is afraid "THE WRONG PEOPLE WILL WIN AGAIN."
1. How many schools does USAT have? safe guess is about 500 or less.
2. What is the current membership? I think I would be generous at 12,000.
3. How many schools have 35 members now to get the free insurance? Not that many. Is it because they don't register all their "important stakeholders?"
This means the average school has 24 members. In that a handful of schools have 200 or so and no one has more than 300 to my knowledge and few in the 200's, we can safely state that in general, added to the state of the economy, the average Taekwondo school is pretty small. They have already register their "important stakeholders." The coaches, referees and competitors are already registered. However, the only way to hit the magic number 35 or 50 is to sign up the "unimportant donors" - parents and athletes who are not competitors and never will be.
What more school owners than board members know is that tournaments are bad for business. Students have to decide between paying their monthly dues and the tournament entry fee. Then whenever you take 10 or more, if someone get hurt, someone loses, mom gets tired of sitting around all day - at least 1-3 of that 10 will quit the school. That is why most schools do in-school tournaments with no or limited contact. There is no money in having a competition school, which is why there are so few of them. Many schools - one sparring class a weekif that many and you can get a black belt without sparring, let alone USAT competition. There is no money in Olympic Sparring for the majority of coaches unless you are a Juan Moreno with branches and seminars, only love of the sport. It is the art that supports the school and the USAT. It is all the "unimportant stakeholders" who pay the bills.
Off on a tangent, but fact of the matter is even Sang Lee with buying of votes could not get the majority of schools to register 35 members. Sang Lee would have upped the ante to 50, but he knew that you don't start at the top number. You milk what you can get but you don't drain the cow dry.
Looking at the 50 average over 3 years proposal - which by the way if you asked club owners if they had known this, would they have re-newed their memberships? Would the new schools that joined, this year or last year through the MAC - would they have even joined? Will they renew next year knowing that there is no chance of getting the magic 50 to vote for a fixed election for a board that will contain a large percentage of paid staff and Independents who don't really know the art of TKD? Will this kill off membership faster than Herb Perez and the HLTC?
Has anyone crunched the numbers? Has anyone polled the clubs to see how many students they have total? The simple math does not support this.
Fact is the only way this proposal would work would be to implement over a 3-5 year period and maybe not even then. USAT is already seen as money grubbing - remember the Stay to Play debacle earlier this year? At this point, this is just an attempt to extort more money from already strapped school owners.
Seriously, Jeff Benz and Harvey Schiller are good people but they are USOC people. There are only 2 groups in their world - the athletes and the officials. The rest are donors who pay for it all. They do not understand the history of how we got to the 35 number in the past and why it never changed. However, they also know that this system is built to encourage cemetary voting. Or at least they did and no longer care. It is also one reason they worked the remediation plan (USAT was NEVER DECERTIFIED).
I would also ask why the CEO would want paid employees on the board, even non voting when it is his job to safeguard and handle their interests and budgets. They may not be able to vote, but they would have access to budgets and other sensitive materials that they don't necessarily need to do their jobs. Jean and Juan have addressed the board many times, they don't need a seat on it. They don't need an every meeting opportunity to lobby their and the CEO's causes. All this does is take allow the CEO more voices on the board to push his personal agendas.
The biggest question of the day has to be "WHY IS THERE SUCH A RUSH TO MAKE SUCH A DRASTIC CHANGE?" The only answer I can come up with is that someone is afraid "THE WRONG PEOPLE WILL WIN AGAIN."
