I had to take my Galleries down at one point due to lack of disk space. They are back though there may be problems viewing everything.
I also upgraded to the latest version of WordPress and now my Comments are broken. I’ll work on fixing that but I’m in the process of creating a new site so this one is a low priority.
Every year at Governing Council, there is a day before the meeting proper devoted to education and issues. The various delegates for St. Moritz tried to make sure at least one of us attended each of the seminars. I went to the Test Chair Seminar, Introduction to the IJS, Club Business, Parents Committee, the Media Seminar, Club Programming and Club Risk Management. I’m going to report on the Media Seminar and the Introduction to IJS separately.
This seminar concentrated on the online program. I really wish both our Test Chairs could have been to it because they answered so many questions about how the online entry of tests worked and lots of Test Chairs found out they weren’t doing things the most efficient way.
The Test Chairs that were happiest with online do the following:
They, or someone they designate, enters all the tests as they come in. Then, they use a feature that lets them print out a tentative test schedule with times and everything all set out. A feature that will be released “any day now”, lets the Test Chair download the schedule into Word or Excel so they can change it around as needed for their particular session. This feature saves the Test Chairs a lot of initial work trying to lay out the first cut of their schedule.
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Something extraordinary happened at Governing Council today — we ended an hour early! Last year I had to leave for the airport in the middle of New Business because we went on longer than I anticipated and in prior years Governing Council has gone on for hours after it was supposed to. I think it went so well because there are enough returning delegates each year that the group as a whole is getting comfortable with how our parliamentarian runs the meeting and are starting to trust the process. Also, in general the debate on issues was much less acrimonious than it was last year. I’m not sure why that is, but I’m grateful.
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I forgot to mention in my Day One report that we’re voting for officers tomorrow too.
I had mentioned elsewhere that I would make up my mind who to vote for after going to the Meet the Candidates forum. I’ll probably get in trouble for stating this publicly, but I’m going to vote for Pfenning. I don’t think the office of President plays to Hershberger’s strengths (and he has many) and I agree with Pfenning on more of the issues.
I don’t think he’s going to win the election though.
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Since US Figure Skating is putting up the results of governing council votes on their web site faster than I can write reports, I’m going to concentrate on giving the background on the issues and explain why the vote went the way it did.
The first part of the day was devoted to By-law changes. It took forever to get through some of the Exhibits. I was sure we’d be doing them come 5 pm Saturday at one point. But we made it through and only ended today’s session 20 minutes late. Not bad and they had warm brie at the Welcoming Reception that followed.
Exhibit A involved getting Casper, Wyoming back into the Northwest Pacific Region. It passed with no debate so I never did find out why Casper wasn’t in the Northwest to start with. (I’ve been asking people but no one I asked knows either.)
Exhibit B was the one that struck “possessions and territories” from the description of USFS jurisdiction. That also passed without debate. Hey, I guess now we can have NGBs in Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands and a few other places. Maybe we could staff those NGBs with US judges and try to build a big Friends of the US bloc such as happened with the Soviet Union broke up. (Yes, I’m kidding.)
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Technically Governing Council doesn’t start until tomorrow. Today is taken up by various seminars where clubs can learn more about what committees are doing, how to run their clubs better and the committees and headquarters staff can solicit feedback and suggestions. There is also a judging school and a club business school that started the day before.
My club has a number of delegates, so we tried to make sure we covered as many of the breakout groups as we could. I ended up attending the Test Chair seminar even though I’m not a test chair, the first half of the Club Business Seminar followed by the last half of the Parents Seminar, an Intro to IJS presentation, the Media Panel, the Club Programming panel, and the Club Risk Management panel.
Then, in the evening we got a chance to “Meet the Candidates” and then break up into three groups for our respective sectional meetings.
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I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my flight to Columbus for the 2005 US Figure Skating’s Governing Council. This is my second year serving as a delegate for my club. Just this morning I received yet another email about the Presidential election. The fact that I’ve received any emails at all asking me to vote for either candidate, as well as the fact that there actually are two candidate, makes this election unprecedented.
The figure skating community can seem strange to outsiders. There is a culture of silence, of being afraid to speak out publicly. Instead, a lot of communication goes on between individuals and small groups behind close doors and often takes the form of gossip. People who disagree with the popular view being expressed by the handful seen to have power often keep silent. They listen to the arguments and nod their head noncommittally and then seek out other members privately to sound them out and see if they are also dissenters. It some ways it reminds me of how contestants on Survivor decide who to vote out the tribunal council. It might make for good tv, but It’s not a particularly heathy way to debate issues and when an organization is poised at a crossroads as USFS is, it can be downright dysfunctional.
That is why, out of the barrage of emails I’ve received on the topic, two stand out.
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I’ve lost my notebook that I had all my notes from US Nationals in so there won’t be any more event reports. Reports on the Senior events are plentiful anyway and that’s all I missed. In spite of no notes, I’m sure I can identify all my photos so I do plan to go through them and put selected ones up in my gallery. Since there is no way I’m going to get them all up there, I’ve decided to do them on a request basis. My list so far is:
1) Evora and Ladwig - US Nationals - got LP up, working on SP
2) Jordan and Barrett - US Nationals - got LP up, working on SP
3) Ashley Loy and Nathan Jarmuth - Pacific Coasts - CDs and FD
If you have a skater who was at Central Pacific Regionals (Novice and Above), Pacific Coast (most athletes) and US Nationals (all but the 7th through 12th place Jr. Men) and you want to see their pictures, drop me a line and I’ll add them to the queue.
By now you’ve probably heard about Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto and their string of 6.0s in their Free Dance. I’ll just say up front that they were wonderful. In fact, if they skate like that at Worlds, they should win a medal. I haven’t ever said that before about this team either.
But first they all had to skate the Original Dance and Free Dance and, boy, was that interesting. The rhythms are the same as for the Juniors — Charleston, Quickstep and Slow Foxtrot — but this time most teams did Slow Foxtrot and Quickstep instead of Slow Foxtrot and Charleston. I found that I really enjoyed the Quickstep and it works particularly well with the Foxtrot. Free Dances, as usual, ranged all over musically from classical, to ballroom, to musicals, to rock ‘n roll.
The following are my impressions of each team in reverse order of their final standings.
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It’s all over but the shouting. Okay, the Men and Ladies have to skate on more time, but the Novice events are done, the Junior events are done and there are hardly any practices to attend. But before we head into the final skate group, let’s review the Junior Events.
Junior Ladies was fairly predictable. Pretty much everyone was saying that the top three would be some combination of Sandy Rucker, Christine Zukowski and Megan Oster. I think most of us were secretly thinking that Sandy Rucker would win, but we didn’t want to say so to be fair to the other two. Sure enough, after the Short it was Sandy, Megan and Christine and after the Long it was Sandy, Christine and Megan.
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