Blame the economy if you want. Andy’s new job (and better yet his move to Seattle!) has combined with Ben’s unexplained lack of free time to hold up our 2010 restart until now. Our authors are working on 5 new topics at the moment, and we hope to have many more Issues and Features for you this year.

If you’re one of our thousands of loyal readers from around the world, here are a couple of things that might interest you:

Submissions

In 2009, several of our best articles came from new voices that wrote to us first instead of being recruited. We want to make this very clear; we LOVE new content, and if you have a great article for us we want to publish it.

Send it to submissions@the-huddle.org, and we’ll get back to you about a publishing date as soon as we can. If the article is well received, we’ll offer you a spot on our regular panel. Too many of you have learned things that many others want to know. Write it up, and send it in!

Features

In the coming months, we are working on several new features about the Rules of the Game and Training for Ultimate. As always, if you have topic ideas please keep sending them in. Several of our first five topics were developed from reader suggestions.

Languages

If we’re lucky, we’ll have a new set of articles in Spanish for you soon. We are also working on moving a set of articles into Chinese on our site as well. Keep checking back.

World Championships

Are you playing in Prague? If so, we want to enlist you as a reporter during the tournament on a combined International blog. Write to us at info@the-huddle.org, and let’s combine to make this the most well-followed World Championship in Ultimate’s young history.

Help Out

Are you an English major that wants a sneak peak each Issue? Be an Editor! If you want to help The Huddle, and you have strong English skills, then we want your help as an Editor. We’ll plug you in to our content management system, and you’ll get first crack at new articles. Freelance editing by the Steves (Sullivan and Murshel) was absolutely vital to our publishing in 2009, and they can’t do it all by themselves (although, heroically, they keep trying). Join us!

With this team effort, and the spectacular volunteer contributions of our authors, we hope to bring you the best year of The Huddle yet. With any luck, this will be the year that we guarantee the annual
existence of what has become, possibly, the most read Ultimate site in the world. Thank you for joining us!

Dear Readers and UPA voters,

Last year’s UPA Board election was, we feel, the beginning of a large-scale set of changes in the UPA. We spent a huge amount of time and energy covering the candidates in part because we felt that there were a large number of extremely good candidates as well as a smaller number of louder, less-qualified candidates. We wanted to give voters another chance to make their own impressions of these candidates and to avoid making what we felt were potentially disastrous choices.

This year’s election is somewhat different. Having researched the candidates, we feel that all candidates that are in this election are strong. Any one of them could do an excellent job in furthering the UPA mission. We don’t feel that the extent of our last year’s coverage is necessary (nor was it feasible for us without sacrificing several issues worth of our normal sport-improvement content).

This year, then, we are limiting our investment to a simple endorsement.

In a very worthy field of candidates for the at-Large position on the UPA Board, we would like to endorse Alex ‘Dutchy’ Ghesquiere as our vote. Our reasons for this endorsement boil down to three main areas:

• Dutchy has proven to be extremely invested in the growth of the sport, and is willing to follow through on complicated and long-term processes to reach further goals.
• Dutchy has a solid handle on the needs of the sport at the highest levels. While we do not feel that a focus on Elite Ultimate is or should be the primary goal of the UPA, future growth and promotion of the sport will require this understanding on the board. With valuable and exciting hires coming in to head the UPA from outside of the game, we feel Dutchy is a good bet to promote his understanding well while keeping the bigger goals in mind.
• Dutchy does a very good job building consensus and describing his positions thoughtfully. With the UPA ready to take on major changes, we need board members that can deliver positive, reasonable words to the greater membership. Dutchy will be very good in this role, in our opinion.

The essay below is Dutchy’s own campaign platform. We wholeheartedly endorse his candidacy, and if you agree with us that this is important, then please don’t forget to vote online at http://www.upa.org/useractivities.

—Editors, The Huddle

——

From Dutchy:

Here I’ve put together a brief summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish if elected to the UPA board. I am intentionally being relatively non-specific about my proposals because I feel I don’t yet have all the information needed to propose specific rule or organizational changes. Specifically, I know very little about changes that have already been discussed and vetted on the board (besides knowing that some exist), something that I have always found frustrating. While I appreciate the board has made some efforts already to better communicate with the membership, I hope to improve the visibility of the important discussions taking place. I’m open to new ideas and discussion, specifically on the points I talk about below, but my general goal on the board will be to promote the elite college and club divisions while keeping the integrity of the game intact. Being elected to the board will allow me the resources and responsibility to achieve this.

My starting point goals include:
1.) I’d to improve the observer programs. I would like to investigate having observers for tournaments come from participating teams. This could take the form of phasing in a requirement or monetary incentive to have elite teams provide qualified observers. Another option is to specifically plan tournaments so that during byes teams would supply observers and line judges for other games, a format that is already in place in most volleyball tournaments. In general, I feel more and better observers are one of the most critical elements to improving the quality of elite ultimate.

2.) I’d like to have the UPA more actively involved in elite tournament organization, promotion, and finding sponsorship opportunities; especially for large college and club regular season events both for the benefit of the tournaments and as a potential revenue source. This is a delicate subject with increasing visibility of independent tournament organization companies, either the UPA could provide this service – employing additional staff and not be required to turn a profit – or make explicit deals with independent companies to run the critical regular season tournaments of the year.

3.) I’d like to directly participate in the restructuring efforts ongoing; I have watched the effort from a neutral position and have been anxious for the UPA to involve more people and do so more publicly than they have so far. My goal with the restructuring will be to provide a meaningful and showcase-able regular season for elite club ultimate teams. I particularly like the possibility of creating an elite league of teams with opportunities for new teams to break into the league and thus allow the UPA to have a consistent set of teams and well-defined season to promote the sport. The premier league of ultimate teams, with spectator-friendly observer setups and the spectacular quality of play we know about in the club division are the right ingredients for dramatically expanding the promotional value of the sport.

Running for the board is a difficult decision for me because if I get elected, I will both put in a lot of work on the board as well as miss the always-awesome Lei-out beach tournament (a significant consideration, believe me). But, I’m willing to put in the time, energy, and miss one of my favorite weekends of ultimate in the year in order to be a part of the upcoming changes for the college and club divisions. First, though, I need your vote to make it happen. So please take a quick trip over to the UPA webpage, log in, and throw your vote in. Or feel free to email me with questions.

Thanks,
Alex (Dutchy) Ghesquiere

Do you know Ultimate too well? Do you stay awake waiting for Fantasy Baseball/Football/Basketball season to come around again?

Here’s your chance to enter into our equivalent. Just for fun.

We’re choosing 6-8 ‘Team Owners’ in the Men’s Division and 4-5 in the Women’s Division. Starting on Monday, July 20th, we’ll put out the rules for those owners, and let them draft their teams from any player in the world. After creating those teams, we’ll let our authors have a chance to break down each team on their strengths and weaknesses, and find out who drafted the best squad of 16-18 players.

We’ll also have a couple of ‘experts’ making attempts at breaking down the draft, pick by pick.

Now, for much of the world, I am sure this sounds like serious nerdiness. And it is. But if you are like us and love Ultimate, know what too much about players you’ve never met, and already spend time daydreaming about Professional Ultimate…here’s your chance to put this knowledge into a game.

Players will draft assuming that they are competing to win a 3-day tournament in September. If you draft players that are injured, we’ll assume they can heal by then. If you draft players that aren’t playing this year, we’ll have to hope they can whip themselves into shape quickly. We’ll have some lists of the players we know (we’ll try to put together a list of 300 for Men’s and 200 for Women’s for our Owners to use as a guide). That super-sweet player you know from Croatia that no one else knows about? That’s just good scouting, and totally allowed.

Owners can be anonymous if they want, but they’ll have to announce which team they are playing for…in an attempt to broaden horizons, our drafting rule is that no team can have more than 2 players currently playing with the Team Owner. Interesting situations that we haven’t accounted for will be voted on by the Owners (or we’ll find a Commissioner to rule on it).

We’ve set up what we think is a decent solution for how to do drafting efficiently and effectively, and we’ll be posting the results for all to see on the following week (assuming no untoward delays).

If you are interested in contributing as an Owner in either division, or as a Commentator on either division, we have a couple of spots left for each role! Let us know at info@the-huddle.org, and we’ll fill those spots on a first-replying basis. If you sign up, but it turns out you don’t know your players as well as you thought….well, you probably won’t win our Fantasy League Prize (we have something for the winner in each division, which we will keep if the Editors team wins it all)!

We hope this is a chance for people to have fun, and to give interested readers a chance to know more about and celebrate individual players at the top of their game.

Keep an eye out for the results coming soon!
Ben & Andy

What do we know about selecting an Executive Director for a large non-profit governing body? Essentially, nothing.

I can only imagine the difficulty in reaching out to a global marketplace and trying to find that single best person to fill a complicated role. Matching skills with future goals is hard enough, let alone trying to find a person that has all of the skills, and will work for your asking price.

In my discussions with UPA members and administrators, price is a major issue; people with the skills that we want as an ED are usually taking a step down, salary-wise, and they are doing it for love of the game or because the job is an especially good fit for them.

Sandie Hammerly was the longest standing ED in UPA history. She presided over a time of tremendous growth and massive increase in player numbers around the USA and beyond. She wasn’t perfect, and despite her success her harsh working style rankled with UPA administrators and members over many issues. Sandie was an iron fist, which is exactly what we were looking for when we found her. Coming from another sport, and with a history of leading non-profits with determination and a nose for protecting the organization’s rights, Sandie was the right choice to lead a UPA that was increasingly dealing with outside for-profit institutions that might otherwise have leaned too hard on the UPA at a cost to us all.

Before Sandie, Joey Gray was an excellent ED at developing bonds to the greater Ultimate community. Like, say, Mixed. But she wasn’t as well equipped to deal with hungry corporations, so when she was done we went looking for (and found) Sandie, who was ready to play tough. The gains we’ve made in the past 5 years cannot be ignored, nor can Sandie’s direct contributions to them. For every coach or team that didn’t get along with Sandie well, or every would be collaborator that was irked, there was a contract or negotiation that was handled professionally and resolutely. From Ben’s experience with CSTV broadcasts of the College Championships, it is clear that without Sandie the game would have been portrayed extremely poorly by a group of editors with little invested in the growth of the game. It was Sandie, by persistence and demanding perfection, that kept those broadcasts useful.

We are in the midst of our next ED search, and it remains to be seen what the UPA has determined are the most important criteria. Even with perfect criteria, there is no guarantee that a qualified individual with the right skills and the right price exists. Given the limitations (and understanding that priorities in these areas mean likely taking on weaknesses in other areas), we propose that the UPA focus on three main strengths.

Most important, to us, is finding an Advocate for the game. We want someone that can walk into a room and really sell Ultimate, both to outside parties and also to the players that have such a stake in the game. The biggest question here: Does this necessarily mean a present or former Ultimate player? We don’t think it is necessary, but non-insiders will need to be able to develop and portray a profound appreciation for the game. This is something that Sandie was never able to do as well as we wanted (keeping in mind that this was seriously de-prioritized when we were hiring at that time). We need a Salesperson.

Secondly, we need an ED that can consolidate the UPA’s view into media outlets. We want an ED that will talk to us. Website announcements, UPA newsletter articles, something…we feel that a major problem with the current state of the UPA is that most of the great things that are being done are almost totally secretive, unless you already know where to look. Did you know that a GrandMaster’s and Women’s Master’s tournament was held this past weekend, driven by the UPA (after intelligently taking up the momentum built up by other Master’s advocates)? Publicity is paramount, and as much as we need a great director we need someone to tell us where that direction lies. We need a Speaker.

Thirdly, we need to develop the UPA into an institution that can join the Ultimate players, coaches and developers around the country. Someone must be able to find a way to leverage the UPA’s resources (both financial and, perhaps more importantly, influential, computational and mechanical) to help the small groups around the nation…and world? As it stands, the UPA is an initial developer of programs. It could be more effective by broadening the tendrils of intelligent support for independent program developers, allowing the UPA to act as a meeting place, a coordinator, an administrator of people from different backgrounds and ideas to bring great ideas forward. We love the UPA Innovation Grants Program (as should be obvious, since we received a $750 grant for this site) but we want the UPA to be, at it’s heart, an Innovation Grant Collaboration. Where would we be without Rodney’s online tools or the NUTC camps or the UCPC or Ultivillage? Where is the next great idea, and when it comes out, will the UPA have a Director than can recognize and support its value? We need a Joiner.

In a perfect world, we take those three skills in a former player who loves the game, works tirelessly, speaks passionately, and wants to work for lift tickets in Colorado. Given that this is unlikely to be in large supply, we trust that our Board is looking for the best Director possible, and we wish Sandie Hammerly well and send our gratitude to her for her long and fruitful reign.