Draft Minutes until approved at the December Board of Director’s Meeting

Potomac Valley Swimming

Board of Director’s Meeting

Overlee Community Center

6030 Lee Highway, Arlington, VA

November 9, 2009

· Dinner

· Call to order at 7:02 pm

· Point of Clarification, the Eastern Zone IMX meet scheduled for February 26-28, 2010 will be sponsored by the Potomac Marlins.

· Approval of October 12, 2009 Meeting Minutes;; Terri noted to the Board that 2 amendments have been made to the posted draft, which were highlighted for the Board before the minutes were adopted. A motion was made to approve the October 12, 2009 Board of Directors Meeting Minutes as amended, it was seconded and approved.

· Approval for sanction for IMX Meet; A motion was made to grant a PVS Sanction for the Eastern Zone IMX meet February 26-28, 2009, it was seconded and approved.

o The question was raised as to whether or not the IMX meet will be considered the same as a National or Zone meet and assessed a splash fee. [After the meeting it was researched and determined that the Eastern Zone IMX meet falls under the same criteria provided for in PVS’s P&P (a meet awarded by a body higher than PVS) and thus a sanction fee will not assessed by PVS.]

Known Items Potentially Requiring a Board Vote

• Adaptation of PVS Vision Statement: Jim Thompson has submitted two versions of a proposed PVS Vision statement;
• Several comments were made including: that the current version is too long, appears to be patting ourselves on our backs a little too much and should be worded in the future tense.
• Jim is open to all suggestions and comments; he has researched “Vision Statements” and has found that they can be in either future or present tense;
• Jim will rework the vision statement based on any additional comments and will send out another version. Any additional comments can be sent to him by email prior to the December BoD meeting. He will bring a revision to the Board in December.

• PVS Safety Chair Position Description; Jack Neill submitted a proposed Job Description for PVS Safety Coordinator
• John Ertter recommended that more details be added to the job description. Including a better description as to the process of sending reports to USA Swimming.
• Bill Stephens recommends that the Safety Coordinator have more (authority) within the LSC and with the Board because of the importance of the position. This may require modification to the PVS by-laws.
• John Ertter and Bill Stephens will work with Jack to finalize the PVS Safety Coordinator’s job description.

• Proposals to modify current PVS Investment policy: Bill Stephens reported that his report was only just recently submitted to the Audit Committee and stated he would like to do more work on it before bringing it before the Board for their consideration.
• The goal is to maximize the investment return to PVS consistent with appropriate steps to preserve capital and provide access to the investments if necessary.
• Bill Stephens will work on writing a more comprehensive report to send to the Board. Once all Board members have the opportunity to receive the recommendation and read all relevant reports they make the necessary decisions. It was recommended the next draft be completed in advance of the December Board Meting.

• Proposed dates for next several Board meetings: all members agree on the following dates and all meeting will take place at the Overlee Community Center.
• December 14, 2009
• January 18, 2010 (MLK Birthday)
• February 15, 2010 (President’s Day)
• March 15, 2010
• April 12, 2010

• Athletes Feedback on the November Open; The Athlete Representatives, who were both at Takoma, were asked how they felt the November Open went this year. In general they felt the meet was well run, they liked having assigned/split warm-up. They didn’t seem to have notice any problems with the air quality and liked having the team from Navy invited. They commented that it was nice to be able to swim different swimmers where they didn’t know what to expect from them. The only negative thing they had to say about Takoma was the drive from Northern Virginia.
• Greg asked the three Athlete Reps to work on and present an “Athlete Vision” statement, at the January Board Meeting.
• Tara talked to some athletes during the November Open and asked them what they thought about the order of events; Most swimmers commented that they were comfortable with the order of events (distance kids were fine with the long events at the end); What they thought of Takoma, Most athletes liked the pool, felt the pool temp and air quality was good.
• A board member asked; why we are swimming the 50s of strokes during the Open meets?
• The response was that a couple of years ago CCM requested to add these events to the Open meets to help retain the 13-14 boys, since many of them are into  the “fun and glamour” events.

Significant Items Requiring Update Reports

• HyTek MM 3.0 Licenses: Jim Garner contacted Virginia Swimming while Tim Husson looked at several other LSC’s arrangements with Hy-Tek. It was found that they all have an “Organizational Licenses” to allow them to perform the administrative functions of the LSC.  With that knowledge Jim has now purchased the Organizational License for PVS’s administrative purposes. In addition PVS is able to use it to run up to 4 meets annually. Jim stated that he informed Hy-Tek that PVS will use it’s license for PVS Age Group and Senior Champs both Long Course and Short Course this year. We will have the option to change the meets if needed, but will need to let Jim know so he can inform Hy-Tek. The license will need to be renewed annually and PVS can designate the meets it wishes to use it for in subsequent years.

• LEAP Project Update: Hirschmann gave a report on the status of this effort; 29 of the 44 items needed to achieve Level 1 have been completed and electronically submitted to USA Swimming. He then reviewed the status of the remaining 15 items. Elections have now been conducted by the Board of Review regarding their officers (Kerry Ellet will remain the Committee Chair, Janet Auger was voted as Secretary and Ward Foley was voted in as Vice-Chair); with this information two additional items are able to be completed. We are still in need of a description of how PVS processes Report of Occurrences; in the absence of a permanent PVS Safety Chair, John Ertter, as acting PVS Safety Chair, said he will prepare it. There are 4 items that pertain to the registration process. Once the annual registration process slows down, Art will have Sumie prepare the needed information. We are still waiting for the draft minutes of the May 2009 HOD minutes to be completed and posted; the delay is due to the missing information that needs to be sent to the administrator. The PVS By-Laws have been updated to reflect the changes voted at the May 2009 House meeting, but have not yet been posted to the PVS web site. Two items pertain to how PVS authorizes sanctioned meets and how we authorize Approved and Observed swims. In the former case the material needs to be updated, in the later case material needs to be prepared.

• P & P:  Art Davis informed the Board that he has marked up the prior version of the P & P to reflect changes voted on by the Board or House since December 2003. He indicated this is in the form of pen and ink changes. There was then discussion as to how best to distribute it. Art asked the Operations Chair, CCM Chair and Finance Chair if they wished to review what is in his markup to make sure all proposed revisions are complete and correct.
• It has been suggested that several others look over the current revisions; Art will pass it on to John Hirschmann for review, once it is cleaned up a little more it will then be scanned and distributed to Board Members for review.

• Impact of New Meet Financial Management Rules: John Ertter reported that all information and financial reports from the October Open have been turned in with 100% accuracy. He was not sure whether to attribute this to the new rules the Board adopted at the October meeting or his communicating more precisely with the Meet Directors what is expected from them.

• Update on PVS Equipment Operations: For the November Open Equipment was delivered and set up at Cub Run Thursday evening. Friday morning equipment was delivered and set up at Lee District, which resulted in a delay of the delivery of equipment to Takoma due to heavy traffic so that it arrived 45 minutes into warm up, therefore the Takoma #2 site was delayed in starting. This caused the meet to run past contract hours.

• January Open; The January Open is currently scheduled for January 23-24, 2010 at four sites; MLK, PGS&LC (1 site) and Fairland (2 sites). Ertter has received an inquiry from Doug Sutherland that there are Prince George’s HS meets the same weekend and he is requesting the use of Fairland for the PG HS meets. Ertter asked the Board whether PVS should try to get Takoma instead of PGS&LC for this meet? What is the impact on the facility? The Board observed that while we wish to be cooperative with other competitive swim programs in our territory, we have also made commitments to these pools many months ago to rent their facility and they presumably made their plans for that weekend based on that and are assuming that they will be received substantial rental income as a result.
• Greg York has asked John Ertter to discuss this with PGS&LC and to look into the appropriateness of getting another pool. John will send information to the Board in the next few weeks.

• 2009 Swimposium & 2009 Convention Expenses: It appears that we have under spent our budget for the Swimposium by about $6,000 due to a combination of more registrations than expected and fewer expenses. For Convention, John Ertter still has not yet received all receipts and expense reports from everyone at this time and has asked that all receipts be turned in as quickly as possible so that he can finish up his report. He expects that this line item will be over budge and thus will offset the unexpected budget gain from the Swimposium.

• The USA Swimming Diversity Conference is coming up this coming weekend. There will be multiple representative from PVS; John Ertter who will attend as a presenter; Sean Link, PVS representative and Art Lopez. Two others have expressed interest and will most likely attend as well.

• Old Business
• PVS Scholar Athlete Awards has now been posted. A Flash mail will be sent asking the coaches to inform the athletes about it being posted.
• Travel: The two Maccabiah game athletes have now submitted all appropriate documentation. Therefore both teams will now be paid their grants.

• New Business
• Ward Foley has submitted a Communication Plan. Greg has asked for input from members of the Board and respond to Ward and John with comments.
• It was felt the proposal before it is adopted should include additional information.
• We need to assess the facts regarding each situation and have only one person designated as the PVS spokesperson.
• We have recently had two situations that involved deaths in our community and we as a Board have had a difficult time agreeing what (if anything) should be said or posted to our website, how promptly and by whom. The Board is looking into creating guidelines for situations such as these.
• The general feeling is that we have a need for two different plans; A Crisis Plan for cases of member misconduct, death or other major occurrences and a plan to communicate other time sensitive information such meet/pool emergencies due to weather, pool unavailability, etc.

• Operations: Dave will be checking in on equipment before the next round of meets. All Meet Directors from November Open were asked to mark and identify broken equipment. Hopefully this was done at each site of the November Open. This will help Dave better determine what needs to be fixed and/or replaced.
• There was discussion of having several individuals meet at a mutually convenient time and place to beth inventory all PVS equipment and determine whether it is still in working order. The PVS Admin Assistant was to poll Board members to find such a date.

• The DC Rec equipment at Takoma equipment is in poor repair. Several people have discussed the equipment issues with Sean Link from DC pools. Bill Marlin has a meeting set up with Sean regarding their equipment in the next few weeks. Link is very receptive to suggestions on how to improve both the equipment and atmosphere at Takoma. Link has a contact at Colorado Timing Systems and plans on contacting them for a repair quote.

• Continuing Education. A coach has submitted an application for Continuing Education to attend the Diversity Summit November 12-15, 2009. Greg made a motion to award the grant, The motion is seconded and approved

• College Education Seminar held at Howard University on October 31, was very well attended with 100 athletes and parents. Several swimmers and parents attended from the Maryland LSC as well. Several college coaches presented, as well as the Head of Compliance from Howard University. Many parent and athletes have asked to hold this event again next year.

• Athlete Representative Elections:  It was suggested to conduct the Athlete’s Rep Election during the Spring Championships Meets instead of during the summer Championship meets. They feel that there are more athletes in attendance and therefore more athletes will participate. This will require a By-Law change.

Reports

• Athlete Representatives;
• Administrative; see report submitted
• Webmaster: see report submitted. Terri handles all posting of the Meet Announcements and Event Files, and Tim posts the Meet Results. Tim has been working on updating and cleaning up the website. Tim will purchasing and testing a broadband card for the use of real time results for our spring time Championship meets.
• Finance/Accounting: no report submitted
• Operations; no report submitted
• Senior: Riley suggested that all IMX events get identified in all meet announcements for upcoming meets.
• Age Group; see report submitted; Bill spoke with the Open Water Chair from the Maryland LSC and is setting up the Open Water event for the Eastern Zone LC Age Group Zones in August 2010 at the Naval Academy.
• Coaches:
•  Yuri: nothing to report.
• Officials: See submitted report. The Clinics have been a tremendous success. Over 300 people are in the pipeline including 22 possible new referees. A request from the Officials Committee to the PVS Senior coaches; please teach the younger coaches how to work with the younger kids as to how to prepare for a meet. They need to learn what the different whistles mean; and they need to tell the kids the heat and lanes that they will be swimming in.
• Strategic Planning; no report submitted.

Adjourn. A motion made to adjourn at 9:49 pm. The motion was seconded and approved.

Next meeting: Monday December 14, 2010 at Overlee; dinner at 6:30, meeting at 7:00 pm