Bruce Draney
*
Letter #2-EB Candidate Bruce Draney
Hello again, to all Delegates and Alternate Delegates.
This is my
second letter to you outlining my views, plans and policies, for USCF,
should you decide to honor me with your vote. My last letter
was sent
in late April right before I was about to attend the Supernational
Scholastic National Championships in Kansas City, Missouri. It was
truly amazing. There were more than 4,500 children from all over the
United States in attendance, yet the rounds began on time, there was
plenty of space and there was a genuine feeling of good will amongst
the adults, coaches, directors and children present. I
only wish I
could tell you that the adults in this organization have as much
goodwill and are in as much agreement as those parents, organizers,
directors and coaches that I spoke with in Kansas City.
The success of the Kansas City event shows what kinds of
things will
work in the USCF if given some encouragement and some nourishing.
The
USCF has been having some problems over the past five years. One of our
biggest problems presently seems to be a fundamental disagreement over
what we should and should not be doing. The current administration has
good intentions, but I believe has made some seriously flawed
assumptions and is placing undue importance upon internet play bringing
in large numbers of memberships and increased revenue. Thus far in
almost a year, the new online service has not been nearly successful
enough to attract significant numbers of new members. The fact that the
service has been offered as a member benefit and is not being paid for
by dues or user fees has led to service cuts and fee increases in other
areas of USCF as well, and is taking away from the traditional core
programs that USCF members have become accustomed to over the years.
The Regular Adult membership numbers reached an historic low of 26,600
at the beginning of April. We lost more than 300 adult members in a
single month and are down over 1,000 compared to last year. We
gained
about 30 of the internet memberships, but obviously with a net loss of
270 adults, this is a huge concern. Since my last letter, there has
been no progress on getting back a fair and reasonably priced Tournament
Life Announcement system for Chess Life magazine. My meeting in Kansas
City, resulted in a motion by Helen Warren to try and form a compromise
proposal by July 10th, but no vote on my committee’s proposals occurred
and meeting in New Windsor in June proved unworkable in the context of
a political campaign.
The present administration has also been overly concerned
with how the
USCF does in the fiscal year that just ended on May 31, 2001. While I
understand that leaders want to be able to look back and point to
specific accomplishments that occurred in their administration I find it
shortsighted to make serious cuts in personnel, spending and service
just to make the operations budget look good for a single 12 month
period. USCF has now been operating for more than a
month without a
Technical Director. There have been several major departures of long
term staff in the past year in New Windsor and service and office morale
continue to be a major problem.
I spoke with several office employees in Kansas City and was
informed
that the primitive state of our technology, the cuts in personnel and
the flood of phone calls about ratings and tournaments have caused
numerous problems for an already overworked staff. People don’t
get
phone calls answered, and sometimes when they do, they don’t get them
returned. Rating reports are being delayed because of a single
typographical error. Catalog orders are still hand
written, rating
reports and TLA forms have to be reformatted and retyped, increasing
not only the workload, but also the likelihood that mistakes or
typographical errors will occur, causing further problems or delays.
Another problem is the lack of knowledge of what other departments are
doing. For example, the Publications department was so concerned with
meeting deadlines, that there was no crosschecking to insure that ads
were being paid for in advance. For over a year, TLA ‘s ran in the
magazine and no one from publications checked to see if payment for the
ads had been made. This cost the organization an estimated $50,000 in
uncollected fees last year alone. Catalog and equipment backorders are
another major problem. Many customers are complaining about ordering
several items from USCF and only receiving one third or one half of them
because the items they want are out of stock. While we all
understand
that USCF has problems, customers cannot be treated this way and be
expected to return to buy things from USCF.
Many of our basic problems are due to the continued inability
of our
office in New Windsor to fully or even mostly upgrade its basic
technological systems. This need is greater than it has ever been, yet
it costs money and therefore interferes with the current
administration’s plans to not finish with deficit spending this year.
What is most unfair is that this critical capital expenditure must be
budgeted for soon and most likely the next Board will be socked with a
larger share of the bill because of the current administration’s
obsession with finishing in the black.
The USCF is always looking for sponsorship and some major
sponsors have
been found, but the current administration has set what in my opinion
are extremely optimistic goals in what they anticipate sponsorship will
be within the next several years. Sponsorship is not a panacea, but it
is often the favorite song that politicians like to sing.
The USCF book and equipment business has long accounted for
over $3.0
million dollars in annual revenues. In the past year the Board and
office have made the decision to greatly reduce our existing book and
equipment inventory. The goal was to reduce our book inventory to only
about 35 titles that sell more than 100 copies per year traditionally.
While it makes sense to cut out dead wood and not stock items that don’t
move, using 100 copies per year as the standard seems quite severe and
has reduced USCF; once a leader in the chess book and equipment business
to the status of a minor vendor. Surely we should be able to
find a
couple hundred titles that people purchase on a regular basis and are
worth stocking. Stocking 35 seems highly inadequate. Many of our
books
were sold off at USCF National events at or near cost. While this makes
this year’s bottom line look good, again it is depleting our inventory
and may cause problems for the next Board should they decide to reverse
some of the unpopular decisions made by the present Board.
There has been some discussion about USCF completely
outsourcing
Correspondence Chess. Certainly Correspondence Chess has fewer people
playing it than it once did, but a fairly significant number of our
members, particularly our older ones, still participate in USCF
sponsored CC events. The current administration seems to have its own
peculiar views about what programs should be cut, eliminated or heavily
taxed and what other programs represent “the future” of USCF.
Unfortunately, I do not share a number of their views, nor do I agree
with some of their fundamental assumptions or decisions. But enough
about what I don’t agree with or don’t like. Here are some of the
things that I will work for, or try to support or do, if I am elected to the
Board:
A) Over the Board Chess and the national rating
system are our two
primary core functions as an organization. There are lots of online chess
playing
servers. There are lots of chess book and equipment sellers, but
there is only one
nationally recognized official over the board rating system in this country.
When I
meet people, they don’t ask me what my ICC or USCL or WBC rating is,
they
ask me what my USCF rating is. For years we have had a monopoly on this
wonderful service and yet we have charged very little for it, and always assumed
that people were mostly joining USCF to get it. We need to leverage the
value of
this rating more than ever before, particularly as competition for
people’s chess
playing time and money increases.
B) Recruitment of new members, particularly
adults. At our peak in
1995, we had nearly 33,000 Regular Adult members in our organization. Within 6
months after we raised dues from $30.00 to $40.00, this number was reached and
we have steadily declined at the net rate of 100 adult members per month since.
There has been no major effort or attempt by any of the last four USCF
Presidents or ED’s to alter, slow down or stop this trend. The attitude
appears to
have been that the matter would eventually solve itself but it has not and it
continues
to be THE major roadblock to our financial well being as an organization.
So how
can we increase or even stop the decrease of our adult membership? Here
are a few
ideas that I would like to try. I feel at this point that we don’t
have a great deal to
lose, since doing nothing has gotten us to where we are now.
1) Positive, positive, positive. All of our
leaders in New Windsor
and on the Board need to be friendly cordial, and warm to all of our members.
We
need to take the time to thank people for their efforts, encourage them to
go the extra
mile, and go out of our way to assist and praise those who are doing the job of
selling
USCF. This sounds easy, but unbelievably, there are a number of horror
stories out
there involving bad experiences with USCF Board members or office staff members.
Nothing kills grassroots efforts more quickly than feeling unwanted, disliked,
or
unappreciated by the organization we are trying to help.
2) Encouraging and nurturing grassroots, volunteer
efforts. We need
to get organizers that are willing to work and are enthused about promoting
their own
tournaments as well as USCF memberships. More than 50% of all members are
signed
up by local officials. Without local support, the organization is in
serious trouble, yet
very few efforts are made to assist new organizers, work with current organizers
or to
prevent upset organizers from quitting. Most people don’t seriously
believe that USCF
will become healthy as long as adult numbers continue to dwindle.
National recruiting
campaigns that are financed completely by the office are expensive and are less
effective
than local grassroots efforts. Local officials had a strong relationship
with the USCF in
the past, but there have been some unwise decisions and poor communication in
the
past five years that have damaged the relationship between the local people and
the
national office.
3) Annual National recruitment campaign and over the
board chess promotion. I
have suggested that the month of September be designated by the USCF as National
Chess Appreciation month. The New Windsor office will coordinate a series
of national
and local events that will kick off a strong push for memberships each fall.
September is
a good month for several reasons. One, it is historically the time of the
year where
people begin to buy chess equipment from USCF for the holiday season.
Secondly most
schools are back in session by September and the campaign could included all
chess
players, not merely adult chess players. Thirdly, the USCF has its
annual meeting at the
U.S. Open in August and the USCF Delegates meet at that time. If the
promotion were
the following month, it would give a new Executive Board the first opportunity
to promote
the organization they had just been elected to lead.
4) Advertise, advertise, advertise. New members
can’t find out about USCF unless
USCF’s name and product are broadcast or communicated to them in some way.
The
primary vehicle for the signup of people locally is the over the board chess
tournament.
Most organizers run small events, but run them on a regular basis. While
not every
event needs to be in Chess Life, many organizers in less urban areas rely on
reasonable
and fair advertising rates for having their events appear occasionally in Chess
Life
Magazine’s Tournament Life Announcements section. I have been serving on
two
committees since these rates skyrocketed in January of this year. Although
as I reported
at the beginning of this letter that the Board refused to vote on our
proposals, the
Affiliate’s Committee and the Membership Growth Committee spent the past month
developing a plan that would force a return to a TLA system that was far less
expensive
and yet would generate more income than the previous system which apparently the
office
found objectionable. Since the Board showed no interest in our proposal we
are bypassing
the Board and are appealing directly to the Delegates, in the hopes that they
will see the
TLA rates as a critical way to help restore the health of over the board chess.
I only hope
that many small organizers have not permanently quit because of the TLA policies
that were
enacted without the support of many people like myself back in late October.
I would like
to urge all of you who are upset about the TLA rates, to support the joint ADM
by our
committees. It may not be perfect but it does recognize the critical
nature of reasonably
priced TLA’s.
C) Developing a long term plan and set of goals.
We seem at times to
be a rudderless and pilotless ship, lurching from one political or
financial crisis to another,
never seeming to have a firm idea what we want to do, when we want it to be
accomplished
and what resources we need to accomplish it. Sometimes people merely
return to our
basic mission statement and say we should be “promoting chess”, whatever
that means.
No we should not focus solely on over the board chess, but we should also
not try to
“promote” all forms of chess with equal amounts of time and resources
either. This would
be impossible and we could easily “promote” ourselves out of business.
Here are some
basic ideas or principles that I believe would get us going in the right
direction.
1) We need to consider the wishes of the majority of
the membership when we plan for
the future of the organization. In my view the present administration has
decided it knows
what the problems are and which direction to go. The only trouble is that
the vast majority
of the membership hasn’t gotten on board and doesn’t (I believe) agree.
2) Once we know the general feelings of the majority of
our members, we need to set
goals for both the short and the long term. We need to determine the
necessary resources
to accomplish those goals, hire people who can and will accomplish those goals,
and assess
them periodically on how they’re doing. Too often in the past, Executive
Directors have
either become too independent or too weak and the Board’s have either
attempted to
micromanage the ED and his staff or have not held them accountable for repeated
failure to
meet organizational or Board objectives. I do not know of very many
companies where the
CEO would continue to be paid six figures regardless of how the company is
doing, or
whether or not any company objectives are being accomplished. Yet, here at
USCF, it
sometimes seems that who you know or are friends with on the Board, counts for
more than
whether the organization is operating successfully or is doing well. This
is a fundamental flaw
presently with our system and it needs to change.
3) If the Board is generally following the wishes of
the membership and the Delegates,
then there should not be a constant shifting of the political sands when new
Board members
are elected. This has been a major problem and the politicization of the
ED or his assistants is
a danger that must be avoided.
In closing, I would just like to make a pledge that if
elected, I will
work with the other members of the Board, whoever they are to try to
make our organization successful. Factionalism is one of the
causes
of our problems. If people would put the salvation of the organization
ahead of personalities, the organization would do better. Some of the
candidates in this race are being very candid and are willing to openly
discuss their views and their ideas. Personally, I feel that a
number
of the candidates running would be deserving of your consideration.
Frankness and honesty is not often a good trait or quality in a
politician. That is why I am hoping that my honesty and my willingness
to say what I think and propose ideas, even if they might be
controversial will count for something when you decide to cast your
vote. I do not expect you to agree with me on every issue, in
fact if
you did agree with me on every issue, it would probably mean that I
wasn’t making clear statements about what I believe or where I stand. I
still believe tha t USCF can be saved. I also believe that this
election may be critical to whether it survives or not. The only reason
I decided to run, was because I felt that some of the candidates were
not familiar with the depths of our problems.
Sincerely,
Bruce Draney