Pardon our mess while we update The Huddle over the next couple days. The Huddle 3.0 begins next Tuesday, March 16th, 2010. Thanks — Ben & Andy

The Huddle

Henry Thorne

of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

As the lone incumbent in this BOD election, your are the only candidate forced to deal with a specific problem: Very few UPA members know what you personally have done for the Board. In this last cycle, you were central in leading the UPA Strategic Planning (aka the Revolution: a fact-finding mission to determine what the aims of the UPA should be for the next 5 years).

The UPA spent a large amount of time and money on this mission, and received (in our opinion) some extremely necessary and worthwhile data. Whether or not it was worth it? That is something that we won't know until the new Board attempts to address these aims.

In our opinion, the data suggests that the membership want Board focus on a large number of issues. For you personally, what 1 or 2 issues that the membership addressed are the most crucial to pursue in the next 12 months.

If only we could have had just 2 things emerge as the big issues through the strategic planning process. I could wrap my head around it if there were 2, but with 11 strategies and 32 tactics I'm spinning. The problem is that you can't say any of them aren't important. They all are. We really do need to do all of these things. And God bless the quality of our staff, we're actually doing most of them simultaneously.

But if we absolutely couldn't do that and had to focus on just two, here's what I think.

The number one thing the sport needs to prepare for to continue its ripping growth path is the 600,000 frequent youth players who are just emerging into college and club Ultimate. That's fully 3/4 of the entire Ultimate population [According to the JPMA study- UPA] and it's something we kicked off by hiring a Youth Director who went out to the APHERD conferences and sold the sport to athletic directors and teachers across the country who, sure enough, loved it and started teaching Ultimate in schools. The kids love it and will want to keep playing. We went from no high school teams here in Pittsburgh to 45 over the last 8 years. And the hoards entering college are just crazy, my son Alex just started at Pitt and they had 200+ kids sign up at the activities fair (we had about 15 when I was in college!). So this surge is real and happening now.

Preparing for and supporting that growth surge is urgent. Many of the strategies touch on this and, once again, they're really all important:

If you forced me down to just two, I'd take "creating Div II college" and "developing the tools and deepening the relationships with college teams and administrators in order to build the Ultimate program at each school". But I'd hate to see us make no progress on tools for accessing fields, strengthening leagues, and improving the observer system.

It seems unlikely to us that money and other resources will be allocated to ALL the proposed parts of the Strategic Plan. For the coming year, which aims do you feel are most appropriate to put on the back burner?

If I was smart, like John McCain and Obama, I'd find a way to not answer this. But I'm an engineer/entrepreneur, not a politician, so I'll just answer you.

We absolutely have to keep up the big push in Youth, we have to add Div II college and Grand Masters and Women's Masters Champ Series, gotta improve the observer system, gotta keep putting women front and center along with keeping sportsmanship at the center of our sport, need to get the alumni/parents on board, gotta build college, and have to create tools to help get field access. The only things we could wait a year on are supporting and strengthening leagues (because they've managed to do an awfully good job of it so far without those additional tools) and supporting the other international organizations. Granted helping them improves the international playing opportunities our players access but still, they are doing well enough to wait a year for us to throw them more resources.

The Huddle's Take: Mr. Thorne has been part of the UPA board for many years, and has an extremely well-tuned knowledge of the issues. We love the focus on college growth and the willingness to take on big issues (like field advocacy and Mr. Thorne's long-running interest/open-mindedness in experimentation with new competition models).