February 10, 2016

USATT Reports – Leagues, Regional Associations, State Championships

My USATT League, Regional Associations, and State Championships Report went to the board in December. (I chair the USATT League Committee and am the Regional Associations Coordinator.) Also online are the minutes of the USATT League Committee Conference Call held on Jan. 16. (You can find these and other committee reports in the USATT Committee Reports Page. Here is a listing of USATT Committees.) Below is the Board Report. If it's boring, skip ahead to the good stuff below! (The formatting below doesn't quite match up with the original - the interface here isn't great.) 

<Start USATT Board Report>

USATT Board Report
USATT League Committee, Regional Associations, State Championships
By Larry Hodges, larry@larrytt.com
USATT League Committee Chair and Regional Associations Coordinator
December, 2015

USATT League Committee
I was appointed the USATT League Chair in March, 2015. Most of the committee members were approved also in March (Adam Bobrow, Michael Levene, Bruce Liu, Han Xiao), with two others added in October (Tahl Leibovitz, Mauricio Vergara).

The USATT League Committee had two major activities this year.

  1. The Regional Team League Prototype went up on the USATT League page, with a corresponding news item. It was a compilation of the best of current leagues (such as the Capital Area Team League and the LA Team League), as well as overseas table tennis leagues (such as Germany and England), and leagues from other sports (such as tennis and bowling). The draft was sent to the league committee for discussion, and then went public. The goal is to set up a series of regional team leagues all over the country.
    1. I've been in discussions with Dell Sweeris about creating a Midwest League in 2016. We met at the Teams in DC in November, and will discuss at the Nationals, now that the League Prototype is up.
    2. Organizers from Massachusetts and Illinois have expressed interest in regional leagues. (Latter may join up with Midwest League mentioned above. This would be separate from the current corporate league in Chicago.)
    3. The Bay Area League is starting up again after being on hiatus for several years
  2. The National League Finals were organized to be held at the USA Nationals in Las Vegas in December. There was some thought to postponing it this year since it wasn't particular well organized from previous years, but after quite a bit of discussion, and with Mauricio Vergara helping to organize it, it was agreed to run them again this year. Here are the current guidelines for that, which will likely be updated soon.

Regional Associations
I was appointed USATT Regional Associations Coordinator earlier this year. As part of this we started a new initiative in November to set up Regional Associations. It's silly to think that an organization with six full-time staff members (plus a few contractors and volunteers), with a budget the size of a 7-11, can organize and run table tennis all over the United States.

Instead, we need to have Regional and State Associations all over the country, with each one primarily in charge of the table tennis activity in their region or state. There are surprisingly few right now, and that needs to change. This is how successful table tennis countries are organized, as well as successful sports in the U.S. And that's what we need to do as well.

The initiative calls for volunteers to step forward to set up Regional Associations. Several have already done so, but we we're in the early stages of this one. Some of the responsibilities of a Regional Association would include:

  • Generally oversee table tennis activities in their state or region
  • Oversee the regional team league in their state or region
  • Arrange tournaments (open and closed)
  • Help to bring in coaches for their clubs
  • Help to organize junior training programs
  • Organize training centers in their state. Every state should have these.
  • Find people to open clubs in the cities in their state that don't have clubs, starting with the more populated ones

Of the three major initiatives I'm working on – Regional Team Leagues, State Championships, and Regional Associations – this is turning out to the be the most difficult. I'm beginning to rethink this, and consider that we focus on setting up the programs – team leagues and state championships, and later on coaching programs and training centers – and let the Regional Associations come about afterwards.

State Championships
This was Gordon Kaye's idea, and I'm glad he convinced me to add this to the regional association programs I'm working on as it looks like it has strong potential. We now have a State Championships page (currently a news item, which will become a regular page later), and a listing of all of the 2015 State Championships. For this year there were 14 state championships, plus 15 states with a state games – but the latter usually aren't quite the same thing.

More importantly, after the news item went up, volunteers from eight states stepped forward and promised to run a state championship in 2016, including the two really big ones (CA and NY), which should bring us to 22 state championships. New state championships in 2016 include:

  1. California
  2. Maryland
  3. Massachusetts
  4. Nevada
  5. New York
  6. South Carolina
  7. Tennessee
  8. Washington DC (which for here I'm listing as a state)

The plan is to:

  1. Have a State Championship in all 50 states and DC in 2016. Realistically, it's unlikely we'll get all 50, but if we strive for it, we'll get more than if we aim for less. The goal isn't just to have state championships, but to turn them into major local media events. The next step, early in 2016, is to start soliciting directly to directors and potential directors to run State Championships in the states that don't have one.
  2. Create a USATT State Championships Page, where state champions from all over the country will be listed.
  3. Have a "Parade of Champions" at the 2016 U.S. Open in December.
    1. What we'll do is at some point between major men's or women's matches in the main arena – perhaps just before one of the finals? – we'll invite all the state champions of that year to come out and do a march around the arena as the crowd watches and cheers.
    2. Details will be worked out later – for example, do we invite only Men's and Women's Singles champions, or all champions? Rating event champions? Do we get a listing in advance and invite them specifically? Do we call out their names as they come out? These will be worked out later, but feel free to offer suggestions - or volunteer to take charge of it!
    3. I would have liked to do this at the Nationals, but the Open is now at the end of the year, with the Nationals in July, and I'd like it at the end of the year so we can honor the state champions from that year. As Gordon pointed out to me, we get more players at the Open anyway, though many are foreign players.

</End USATT Board Report>

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