NMS House of Delegates Meeting
October 16, 2004
The meeting was called to order at 10:16 AM.
ATTENDING: Craig Leasure, Tex Doherty, John Gadbois, Betsy Patterson, Steffi Winter, Deborah Kruhm, Natalie Riley, Dale Berg, Doug Forbes, Gary Riley, Jay Winter, Lou Metzger, Janet Lyon-Huffman, Rusty Bernstein, Jeff Mortensen, Floyd Senoski, Steve Costigan, Phil Coe, Beverly Leasure, Betty Busby, Charles North, Steven Morrell, Carlos Lopez Carrillo, and Julie Rogers.
The minutes of the May 22, 2004 NMS House of Representatives meeting were approved.
COACH REPRESENTATIVE (Doug): Tex Doherty is this year’s recipient of the ASCA Age Group Coach of the Year in NMS.
AGE GROUP VICE CHAIRMAN (Betsy): The 2005 Zones meet will be in Utah. Betsy will come up with a list of expectations for athletes, parents, coaches, and chaperones.
Betsy asked that the House accept her proposed modifications for our Rules and Regulations for All-Star Selection, with the following changes brought up at the Board meeting:
Section 5 - CHANGE: and 15-18 TO: 15-16 and 17-18
Section 8 - ADD: Any decision to disallow a swimmer from participating due to moral or ethical character, and/or current standing with his/her club will conform to all provisions of USAS "Right to Participate" rules and all USAS and NMS Rules and Regulations.
Motion: A motion was made, and approved, to accept these changes to our Rules and Regulations for the All-Star Selection Process, when the final language for all procedures is approved.
The NMS Age Group Committee shall submit final language to the NMS Executive Committee for approval prior to January 1, 2005.
FINANCE VICE CHAIRMAN (Gary): The Board recommended that the budget be accepted with an addition of $2,000 to the Zone Champs expenses line item, making it $5,730.
Motion: A motion was made, and accepted as amended below, to approve the budget with the Zone Championships Expenses at $5,730.00, and total projected income as $995.00
Amendment: An amendment was made, and passed, to add $250.00 to the Athlete Activities expenses, making them $400.00, and changing the total projected income to $745.00.
Amendment: An
amendment was made, and passed, to move $500.00 from the Swim Officials
expenses to the Equipment expenses making Officials expenses $500.00 and
Equipment expenses $700.00.
SECRETARY (Julie): A new email list will be sent out after this meeting. To avoid confusion with different versions of meet results, the results will only be listed once within NMS web sites, and have links to that site if needed on other sites. A Yahoo Discussion Group will be used on a trial basis for sharing information and posting reports.
TREASURER (Rob Jones): There were some requests for reimbursements. The first was for Justine Schluntz for Olympic Trials.
Motion: A motion was made, and approved, to reimburse Justine Schluntz for$1,768.45 for US Olympic Trials’ expenses.
The second issue was reimbursements for Justine Schluntz for Senior Nationals, and Nate Rogers for Junior Nationals.
Motion: A motion was made, and approved, to split the issue of reimbursement for Justine Schluntz and Nate Rogers for their national meet travel expenses.
Motion: A motion was made, and approved, to reimburse Justine Schluntz $362.90 for travel expenses to Senior Nationals.
Motion: A motion was made, and approved, to table the reimbursement request for Nate Rogers until New Business was brought up in this meeting.
The last issue was reimbursements for the Zones meet. There was only one request from a swimmer for reimbursement. Debbie would like to make sure that eligibility requirements are met before athletes get reimbursed, and needs a list of the swimmers that went to the meet. Natalie asked for reimbursement for her expenses from the meet. Several motions were made but no vote was taken and finally one motion was approved.
Motion: A motion was made, and approved, to reimburse the three swimmers with Zone qualifying times $313.00 each, which is 50% of the amount they paid NMS for airfare and lodging.
TECHNICAL PLANNING CHAIRMAN (Janet): Rio Grande League information is out to everyone.
Kirtland and Duke are both interested in bidding on the two 8 & Unders Finals meets. Janet would like to see the 8 & U Finals meet keep the same format as the past couple of years. The Technical Planning committee will study the 8 & U Finals meet format and advise the HOD at the spring meeting, and will also meet with anyone interested in changing the format of state championship meets.
SENIOR ATHLETE REPRESENTATIVE (Steffi): Amanda Huffman is the new Junior Athlete Representative. Steffi would like to have a meeting or social for athletes instead of the meeting at the state meet.
There were several suggestions from the athletes at the state meet in Farmington. They would like to shorten the prelim session in order to have more time between prelims and finals. It was suggested that the 800 Free relay be eliminated, and that there be over the top starts during the morning sessions.
Steffi was asked to work with Janet to try to plan a better time for the Athlete’s meeting at the state meet.
There will be a Registration workshop in Florida in April.
Teams need to clean up their Team Manager databases in preparation for electronic athlete registration.
FCAT received an award for their increase in membership, and Bev Leasure received an award for continually getting information to Debbie on time.
Five invites have been sanctioned this season. Debbie asked all teams to please update their Team Manager to the latest version, and stressed that Meet Directors verify all registrations prior to a meet to avoid problems when results are uploaded into SWIMS.
COMPUTER CHAIRMAN (Dale): There is a problem with verified times at the State meet. The number of athletes at the State Championships was significantly lower than the preceding seven years. Hy-tek now has a Team Manager Online program with a searchable database, enabling swimmers and parents to check times of all swimmers within the LSC. Dale hopes to use this program soon and have a link to it on the web site.
OFFICIALS CHAIRMAN (Lou): Lou proposed a resolution that was voted on and passed as follows:
Meet Referees and Meet Directors will have the ability to determine if fly-over starts can be used at a meet.
Lou would like all teams to try to get more parents to become officials.
RECORDS/TOP 16 COORDINATOR (John): All records are updated and online almost instantly.
EQUIPMENT CHAIRMAN (Jeff): Jeff would like a thank you letter from NMS sent to Vince for the great job he did with the equipment.
Motion: A motion was made, and approved; to reimburse Rob Jones $345.00 for the replacement of the touchpad strips that were lost at the State meet.
John asked that the $200.00 damage deposit check from FCAT for the lost touchpad strips be held, since some of the strips have been found, and they are still trying to determine how many they have.
Jeff will check prices and investigate whether the scoreboard should be replaced or repaired, will purchase eight new stopwatches, and will also check out prices of new lap counters.
OUTREACH CHAIRMAN: This position is open.
SAFETY/ADAPTIVE SWIM COORDINATOR (Rob Putnam): Craig reported for Rob Putnam that there had been one accident reported.
NATIONAL TIMES VERIFICATION (Craig): Craig reported that his job takes very little effort with the SWIMS database now in use.
PUBLICITY (Natalie): Natalie has contacted USA Swimming to get fundraising ideas for clubs and ideas for NMS sponsors. Sponsors should be businesses that are statewide businesses.
REDBOOK (Trish): Craig reported for Trish that she hopes to get a new Redbook out soon. Dale would like someone to check qualifying times in the Redbook. John agreed to check the qualifying times before they are published.
NEW BUSINESS:
1. Requests for Reimbursements
There was a proposal to reimburse administrators and athletes at the same level. A resolution was proposed and passed as follows:
It is the intent of NMS to reimburse its athletes that go to senior national swim meet time trials 100% of their costs.
Reimbursement for Nate Rogers for Junior National travel expenses – There was a discussion as to whether this Juniors meet was the exact same one as mentioned in our Rules and Regulations.
Motion: A motion was made, and was not approved, to reimburse Nate Rogers for travel expenses to this Junior Nationals meet and have this treated as an exception based on the fact that we want our swimmers to aspire to higher caliber meets.
It was proposed that in the future NMS consider reimbursing this Juniors meet as well as sectional meets, and also to make sure coaches get reimbursement forms out to everyone.
Gary will put a committee together to look at reimbursement for national meets and come up with a proposal to change our Rules and Regulations for the spring meeting. Doug will help Gary.
2. Meet Bids
2005 SC 8 & Unders Finals – Duke City
2005 LC 8 & Unders Finals – Kirtland
Kirtland would like to host this the same weekend as their Invite in July.
3. Convention
Craig, Debbie, Dale, and Betsy went to the National Convention in Orlando in September.
Craig reported that he thought USA Swimming was doing a great job spending the extra monies they are receiving from the dues increase. There are a lot of things we can obtain from USA Swimming to help in recruiting, many of which can be downloaded off their new web site.
Debbie attended many workshops and meetings. One explained their new process of accepting electronic registrations from clubs, and another the process of verifying registrations using a generated file. With the use of SWIMS it is very important that names and IDs be correct.
Dale reported that USA Swimming would like to implement background checks on non-athletic members, and is researching how to do them. The issue of drug control in supplements was once again a big issue. Phillips Conoco, Mutual of Omaha, and Speedo have renewed their contracts with USA Swimming as sponsors.
Betsy reported that USA Swimming seemed to show a lot of support for the LSCs.
4. Interactions with NMAA
We are guests at high school meets and should not make it difficult for them, but rather try to help the new staff.
5. State Meet Format - Changes in State Meet format will be done at the Technical Planning Committee.
Meeting was adjourned at 1:50 PM.
Respectfully submitted,
Julie Rogers, Secretary