Kalle Weeks and Brad Baker talk about their vision for the USFA over the next four years. For those of you who may not know this, the officers of the USFA are elected for a four year term.
Transcript:
George: Good evening everybody. It seems like we all know each other. So nice to see you all come to NJFA on a Sunday late afternoon. This is not a fencing tournament, obviously. And that’s usually why we’re here. But tonight, Frank and I and the other officers from the NJFA have invited Kalle Weeks and Brad Baker to come and talk about their vision for the USFA over the next four years. For those of you who may not know this, the officers of the USFA are elected for a four year term.
And their election takes place just before the Olympics every four years so that they assume office immediately following the Olympics. As Brad was saying, he thinks it may be the day of the closing ceremony. So we invited them because, at least in my tenure in the USFA, there hasn’t been a contested election. But there is a contested election this year. We elect a president, three vice presidents, a treasurer and a secretary.
The opposition slate is only five people. And you’ll see their biographies at the back side of the handout because they are not contesting the secretary’s position. So Brad will be the USFA secretary for the next four years. Kalle and Brad were selected by the nominating committee of the USFA, who among other members included our former coach at Columbia, Nicole Letner. So we have a little stake in the nomination as well. That’s about all I have to say. I think both of them would like to say something about what they think. And then they are subject and open to questions. And hopefully we’ll have other people walking in by then.
Kalle Weeks: The main part of the evening, though we’d really like to have a conversation with you, have you ask us some questions. We might have questions for you as well. And to just kind of go forward with the idea of an opportunity to share ideas. My name, as George said, is Kalle Weeks. I’m from New Jersey. And started here on – actually ____ ______ _____.
Female 1: I’m pretty much the person to blame.
Kalle Weeks: She’s pretty much the person to blame. That’s what she said. ______ kind of summoned me from the side of the strip and got me into helping with local ______ communities and various things within the New Jersey division. Which then moved me on to doing things nationally. Brad over here will introduce himself. And then I’ll say a couple things about the other nominees just so that you get a feel for us as a group.
Brad Baker: Most of you know me. For those of you who don’t; I’m Brad Baker. As George mentioned, I’m running for secretary. I got into fencing relatively late from an athlete point of view. I started in college at Johns Hopkins. I fenced on the varsity team there for four years. And then have continued since then. I still actively compete primarily in sabre, kind of involved in refereeing on the FOC.
I have a FIA license in all three weapons as a referee. I do pretty much everything at the national level. And whatever type event locally. My full time job is the ______ coach. I’m the assistant coach at Temple University where I handle the FAA sabre squad, some of the administrative duties for our team. I’ve been involved in FAA at the board level for the past five years.
And various other _______. I was ________ chair for the north atlantic section for three years when I was living up in Massachusetts. I now live in the Philadelphia area. So I basically get involved in long ______ fencing. That’s what I like to do. That’s what I spend whatever spare time I have doing.
Kalle Weeks: The other folks who are on, who are going to be part of our team – and that’s just how we’re thinking about ______. We’re not ______. As George mentioned, there’s an election. There’s a contested election. And the way that it works, there will be six candidates for vice president. And it will be up to the members, the eligible voting members, to vote for their choice as to three of those people to serve as vice president. The other – the three people who were nominated by the nominating committee are Jerry Benson, Roberto Sobalvarro – I’m still _____ that name – Roberto Sobalvarro and Mark Stasinos.
They each bring different skills and experiences to the position of vice president. And it’s great ______ to put together the bios from our website. And so you can take a look at those at your leisure. Greg Dilworth is the official nominee for treasurer, who is active and very busy. A business type who has an MBA and lots of experience in finance. So we’re confident that he’ll bring good expertise to play in the role of treasurer. Interestingly, we all came to this nominating process as individuals.
Nobody went out and built a slate or grabbed together a team. We went to the nominating committee as individuals and we were selected as individuals. And I think that the nominating committee really thought very hard about the way that their choices would work together. And selected people who had complementary skills and experiences and that would make a good team to lead the organization in the next four years.
And that turned out to be true. As a group we started to work together. We had only one face to face meeting but we’ve done a lot of email and through web getting together. And so what we’ve been able to do is to begin to put together some of the strategies that we want to use going forward. We’ll continue to develop our brand. But because we really are a team coming together, we want to be able to work together to make sure that we’re all on the same page.
And not just ______ throw ideas out and perhaps have to learn later that maybe something is going on that isn’t going to let that happen well. So our processes are taking shape. And you’ll see in the handout that George put together on there. There’s material that he pulled off our website. It went up yesterday. And it is usfanominees.com. And you can go there and see some additional things as well. Just a little more on the future side, you should expect to see ballots in the middle of May. Maybe even a little before.
Let’s see – according to bylaws they must be mailed by May 1st. So if you’re a voting member you’ll get a ballot. And it will be up to each person to fill out that ballot and make sure it’s submitted in advance of the official meeting, which will take place at summer nationals. So enough with the speech. One of the things that we did when we got together was to think about where should we all be at the end of our term? What are the goals that we should work for? Not kind of, gee what’s a good idea.
But what are we really trying to do? And so we divided things essentially into three major categories. And I’m just going to spit them out. I think they’re in the handout. But the first set are kind of organizational. We want to make sure that we have really strong relationships with the other organizations that are actually governing bodies for our organization. That’s FIE and USOC. We want to reach out to colleges and universities and their fencing programs.
We know that we need to streamline organization of operations and keep ______ to the national office. And obviously, the whole technology piece is a pretty big one there. But also, are there ways that things can be made to operate more efficiently? And as most of you know, we’ll be looking for a new executive director. And one of the things that I would certainly hope that we would be able to do in that search is to ask potential candidates how they would organize.
What skills do they bring to running what’s essentially a pretty big organization in order to best service _______? We also want to make sure that we support all of our clubs. And we know that we need to examine our government. Do we have the best structure in order to make things happen for the organization? So those are the kind of organizational goals.
