Technical Director Update Sept 2008

Technical Director Update

September 24th, 2008

Hi again, this one will be relatively brief as I have only three topics for today – Upcoming Clinics, Officials Clothing issue, and Officials bringing guests to races.

The results of the last update survey about clinics to host at the Conclave were relatively conclusive that the two most desired clinics are a BMX clinic and a level A road and track, so we will definitely plan on that. In fact, the plan is to film the BMX clinic and produce our second DVD as part of a distance education program. Therefore if you come we will make you a star, and future generations of students can watch and listen to your insightful questions and see if you can stump the prof J.

I had also planned on hosting a MTB National Commissaire course, but with the last email blast, we had only a single person respond. I am sending a separate cover to all level A MTB officials to make sure we really do have enough interest to hold that clinic, which may or may not coincide with the conclave.

As for dates, right now we are probably looking at 3^rd week in November or first week in December. I have to check on availability of instructors and space at the OTC. Please get back to me again regarding your interest and availability in this time frame. Also, if anyone has any final requests for a course to teach, this is the last chance to nudge the ship another direction.

I know what you are thinking – good, he is going to tell us where we can get officials clothing. Nope. We may have a new program in 2009, but until then we have nothing to announce. In the meantime, what I did want to mention is that it is very important that you do not wear your USAC officials clothing/patches at events that are not USAC events. A common example is that many tracks do not sanction their weekly races with USAC, although they may sanction the odd national championship or qualifier with us. If you wear a USAC patch at a race not sanctioned by USAC, it can open us up to big problems when someone tries to access our insurance product and finds out there was no USAC insurance for the race. Your wearing USAC officials clothing will make riders think it is a sanctioned event. Also, we do not count any event for upgrading points if it is not sanctioned, so there will be that confusion too. Thus, please be aware that if you work races that are not sanctioned by us, you should not be wearing any USAC logos.

This issue comes up every year, unfortunately. Our events department has to coordinate housing with many different organizers and many officials for all of our bigger events. In general, it is expected that officials who go to a race to work are not bringing family along. Many officials have shown up with wives or children and then just said, “oh, just charge me for half of my room.” Unfortunately, this really does not work. On many occasions the attempt to do this throws the whole housing arrangement into chaos. If we put your spouse in your room, where are we to put the other official we had planned to put in your room? There might not be one. Or, at the very least, now we have to buy a new room for the displaced official, so really it is not half a room; it is the whole room that must be purchased.

Other officials may decide to just stay with their spouse at a different location and make their own arrangements. This is certainly better than the scenario above, but now we have the logistics problem. Where is the missing official when needed? How is the official getting to the race? What happens if the Chief Referee wakes up at 3 AM and suddenly feels the need to go drive the course with the missing official? Okay, that last one was a bit of a stretch. There may be even more subtle reasons to not bring a spouse, such as personality issues caused by the spouse. In general, if you accept a national-level assignment, it is our expectation that we are assigning you, not you and your spouse, and there will be no guarantee that there will be room for said spouse at the event. To be frank, I have known several officials over the years whose careers were negatively influenced because they always brought their spouse, and there were organizers, staff, and other officials that did not want that person around. In a nutshell, the feeling was that spouse X was the penalty that had to be paid to get official Y to the event. Some organizers were not willing to pay this penalty. So, just a word to the wise – the best thing to do is meet up with your spouse when the event is over.

Now, that being said, are there officials who do successfully bring family to events without causing such troubles – of course. Such a situation always starts out best by asking the question to USA Cycling (for National Championships) or to the organizer (non-championships) whether anyone would mind if a guest was brought along. Some organizers might even offer such an arrangement. You just have to be very careful. If I call up the organizer and say, “Joe, I would like to bring my wife. Can I have my own room?” I have just begun the path down the slippery slope called “Conflict of Interest.” Joe may be intimidated by having an official ask the question. Joe may not want to rearrange housing to make that happen, but fears retribution if he does not. The other side of the coin is that I am now beholding to Joe for doing me a favor. It may then be difficult for me to give Joe the straight talk about flaws at his race while he did something extra nice for me.

So, how can this situation be managed effectively? First, recognize the potential conflict of interest exists and prepare to manage that. Second, recognize the possible annoyance factor to the organizer to make housing adjustments. A perfect example of how this can work is that one of our top officials who would be CR wanted to bring a spouse to a national championship. Knowing how housing works at such an event, the CR asked whether the nature of the man/woman split on the crew would be making it necessary to have an odd person out anyway. If it worked out that there was going to be a single room issued and that the spare bed was not already dedicated to a USAC staff person or someone else, then could the CR have that room solo and invite the spouse? If that was not going to naturally work out that way, then the CR was fully prepared to buy a room in the same hotel anyway. Such an approach worked well in that scenario because no perk was expected, it began early with a question not a statement, and due to the long history between the official and USA Cycling, there would be no conflict of interest possible anyway.

That is all for now. Please get back to me ASAP on the conclave questions. Thanks.