Sorry I was always told the the USTU folded due to owing $ 1 million in back taxes to the IRS and had to file for bankruptcy. This created the lack of previous board members wanting to or wanting the risk of being in the new NGB for fear of future personal financial liability?
That is certainly NOT what happened. What happened was Jay Warwick signed a contract on behalf of USTU with Century, who his friend Herb Perez was working for at the time. Herb urged Jay to have Century sponsor USTU, and Jay did it. Problem was, I don't believe that Jay had permission from the officers to do it. The USTU Secretary General Soon Ho Kim hated Jay because he felt Jay was stealing his powers, powers that rightfully belonged to the Secretary General, not the Executive Director. Secretary General Kim saw that as an opportunity to get rid of Jay and so he convinced the officers to let Jay go.
When Jay Warwick left USTU, his good friend Jim Scherr who was or was going to be USOC Executive Director, got really upset and he made the decision to get rid of all the Koreans in USTU, for what they did to Jay. Soon after Jay Warwick left USTU, USOC started sending letters to USTU saying that it was an "unstable organization".
About a year later, USOC made a determination that USTU was not using the $300K in USOC grant money for athletes (which we were, because that is what paid for trips to International Events), and ordered USTU to repay the $300K or face decertification. The demand for repayment was timed such that USTU had very little operating revenue, in the fall of each year, because membership dues and other funds already came in for the year and there was no tournament revenue. They demanded payment, knowing that we could not repay the money.
In January 2004, USTU agreed to a "remediation" whereby USTU would be "temporarily" run by USOC and the organization rehabilitated. Instead, the USOC gutted USTU, and completely changed the organizational structure from a volunteer run organization to a staff run organization. They did the same thing at USOC, getting rid of all of volunteer leaders at that level and instead made it so a USOC staff person, the Executive Director, rank the show. They then wanted to make all of the USOC NGBs into the same model, and USTU was chosen as their test case.
One of the first things that they did was kill the OTC Resident Athlete program. Next they attempted to get rid of the state associations. These two moves showed that USOC was not interested in remediating USTU but instead wanted to gut the organization and have it so USOC would have almost complete control over it, through their USOC appointed bureaucrat Executive Director.
Problem is that the USOC staff people did not know or understand Taekwondo as well as its complex web of relationships that held the organization together and made it work. Instead, they relied on the advice and guidence of one of the only Taekwondo people that they knew, Herb Perez, who was an USOC AAC member back when Marty Mankaymer was USOC President.
In the process, most of the seniors left the organization and took their students with them. Most just stopped attending all national events, although some of their American born students migrated to the AAU. USAT lost about 80% or more of the USTU membership, and the organization limps along with about 5-8000 members, down from 40-50,000 during the USTU days.
Because there are less members, USAT raised prices to keep revenues up. This caused even more members to leave.
We also lost our referee infrastructure. USTU used to certify about 1000 referees per year. I don't know what the numbers are now, but it probably 10-20% of that.
Seven years later, we are where we are, on the brink of bankruptcy and financial failure.
By the way, I predicted all of this way back in the summer of 2004, and was severely criticized by all the angry pro USAT/anti USTU types who felt happy and vindicated that they brought down the USTU. Most of those pro USAT/anti USTU types have now become anti USAT. There they are, people like Ronda, who now find themselves without a life jacket dumped into the ice cold Nordic Sea, doing their best to aim the Titanic into an iceberg. I sit here and say, why bother? The Titanic will hit the iceberg no matter what you do, just like I said it would back in 2004.
That is what happens when your disregard your seniors and put inexperienced people into positions of power for which they have no business being in. Of course it is going to kill the organization.
