I skipped the first part of the Board of Governors meeting to attend David’s high performance breakfast. As a quick note that I should have made in my reports from David’s seminars, all of the changes that David is discussing are pending approval by the USEF High Performance Committee. David made this clear at the beginning of his Wednesday seminar, which I missed due to travel. We joined the BOG at the beginning of the committee chair reports. My notes are below…
Jon Holling — Active Athletes and Professional Horseman’s Council — Jon recapped the PHC meeting from Thursday. The biggest point he made is that the riders are most concerned with the new FEI qualification rules, both from the standpoint that the rules are hard to understand and that the new categorized rider system seems to put different professionals on different levels since a higher categorized pro could move a horse up the levels more quickly and thus might be more appealing to big time owners.
Lou Leslie — Area Affairs — Lou said that the new Advancing Athlete program is in development. Lou explained meetings are ongoing and that we will hear much more on Sunday. I, for one, am very excited to learn more about this program.
Robert Kellerhouse — Competitions, Gold Cup, AECs, Rules, Course Advisors, and Classics Series — Robert is a busy busy guy! He explained that the prelim three-day has fallen by the wayside, but the training and novice three-days have been really strong this year, “providing a nice entry and mid level competition for people to reach for.” Robert said the Gold Cup is running strong thanks to great events and terrific sponsorship support. Robert hinted at some exciting new initiatives for the AECs. As for competitions, Robert said that starers are up 4.5% over the past year, and he projects modest growth for next year. He guessed we will break the USEA annual entry record in 2013. Robert addressed the FEI rules, saying that that the FEI rule details are still in development including a phone meeting last night of the FEI eventing committee. He said that the timing of the rules implementation is frustrating, but that it is a product of the FEI’s system of making rules. Robert, who sits on the FEI eventing committee, has been a tremendous ambassador at the convention for the new FEI rules because he understands the frustrations and tries to explain the logic behind the FEI decisions. Robert explained that the categorized rider system was born from a licensing provision where the FEI wanted to stop qualifying all riders in the same way. The FEI will always be under pressure to push down qualifications for elite riders. The uncategorized riders will be treated the same way for qualifications as in the past, but the rider will have to qualify all the way with one horse. The categorized system was then built to give more experienced riders a faster track to qualification. Robert said that this change is a result of feedback that the FEI eventing committee received from national federations.
Phyllis Dawson — Licensed Officials — Our beloved officials are getting old! Jack Leary has performed a projection on the number of officials that we will need over the next 10 years based on retirements (assuming a retirement age of 70). Phyllis said we will lose approximately 40-50% of our officials in the next 10 years. A big concern is that we will retire 66% of “R” judges (29) and “R” TD’s (26). This is concerning because the pipelines for these officials is much harder than lower level officials and we don’t have enough people in the pipeline to fill the spots right now. These projections also do not take into account the growth of the sport over the next 10 years. It seems that an issue with the pipeline is that the people who are qualified to be officials are still riding and don’t have interest in being officials at this point. USEA President Sabo said that he wants to put as much energy and attention as possible into recruiting new officials.
Dr. Mark Hart — Membership and Program Development –Dr. Hart explained that the one interesting thing about USEA membership is that it is incredibly diverse. He said that the USEA had 14,000 members in 2004 and we have 11,612 members today. He said that one thing to consider with the decline is the economy. Even if our membership number stays steady the important thing to understand is that it is a fluid membership group, with people coming in and leaving every day. Growing membership depends on reducing exiting members and brining in new members. Logically, Dr. Hart posed the rhetorical question about why do we want to grow? He said that more members generally means a lower cost per member of all of the USEA’s programs and more membership attracts better sponsorship dollars. Dr. Hart said that conversations with rider affiliates have revealed that there are 2-3 times the number of people eventing (at unrecognized events) than people who aren’t part of the USEA. Membership in the USEA is required to compete at USEA events. He said that the low hanging fruit for new members are the people who already event but aren’t members. He suggested trying to bridge the gap between recognized and unrecognized events as a way to bring in new members. Dr. Hart mentioned the awesome development of the USEA website over the past few years and suggested that it makes sense to restrict viewing portions of the website to members only. He said that 40,000 unique people a month visit the USEA website and the USEA has 11,000 members. Around 18% of the members leave the USEA each year currently and about that same number of new members. New members are often young riders. The big drop-off of members occurs in the 20-30 year old demographic (riders go to college), and then, surprisingly, the drop off rate is steady from 30-70 (Dr. Hart said he would expect older members to drop off more rapidly, but this isn’t the case). President Sabo said that two keys to growing membership are bringing in more younger members both as riders and as non-riding members.
Carol Kozlowski — Safety Committee — Here we go.
Carol recapped the history of the rule change proposal at last year’s USEF convention, from the USEF Eventing Technical Committee changing the language from reversing the one fall rule for training to below to all levels, to the USEF Safety Committee voting against the rule despite all eventing members of the committee voting for the rule change, to the rule going to the USEF Board, to the Board not approving the change as a result of the disunion. The USEF annual meeting was a wake up call for eventers to get a more unified voice on the issue.
In August, the USEA Safety Committee voted 11-3 to approve the rule change for allowing training and below to continue. The USEA Board approved that provision in August 13-7, with the belief that the rule should go forward without being changed. While all this was happening, Dr. Mark Hart was working hard to somehow define a fall as safe to continue or not safe to continue. The issue is that it looks like the USEF Safety Committee will not pass the rule change that might allow potentially concussed riders to continue–falls need to be defined somehow. Thus, the latest rule change proposal provides that the rider has to land on their feet, with the language being further modified yesterday to say that the rider has no apparent injury. The latest proposal also struck training level from the levels allowed to continue, with the hope that it could be expanded to training level in the future. Carol does not feel that the rule will be able to be changed for levels any higher than training level, ever. With yesterday’s Technical Committee approval, the rule change will now go on to the USEF Safety Committee at the USEF’s annual meeting in January. Carol thus had to explain that the change that was voted on yesterday was not the change that was approved by the USEA board in August. Remember that the USEA can only advise the USEF on rule changes, it is up to the USEF committees to make the rule changes and the USEF Board to approve them.
Malcolm Hook, who chairs the USEF Technical Committee and is the incoming chair of the USEF Safety Committee, then addressed the Board and said that he will have the challenge of selling the Safety Committee on an idea that they rejected earlier this year, although the rule change is significantly different (novice and below, remain standing and uninjured provisions). Malcolm seemed optimistic that the USEF Safety Committee would pass the newer version because the occurrence of head injuries are significantly reduced at those lower levels. Malcolm also echoed Carol’s sentiments that the rule change is very unlikely for any level above preliminary.
President Sabo mentioned this, but I want to give Malcolm a ton of credit for taking the rule change forward as best as he possibly can despite the fact that he opposes the rule change personally. I wouldn’t expect anything less than this show of fairness and class on behalf of our members from Malcolm.
President Sabo then said that he wanted the USEA Board to vote on the rule up or down. President Sabo also echoed Malcolm’s sentiment from Thursday, that if the USEF proposal does not pass the USEF Safety Committee it should not go on to the USEF Board. Malcolm Hook said the USEA Board didn’t need to vote for it, but that since the wording has changed from August a vote would make sense. The rule in its new form (first fall of rider for beginner novice and novice where rider lands on feet with no apparent injury is 65 penalties rather than elimination) passed the USEA Board 16-2, a stronger approval than the 13-7 vote in August. The rule change proposal will now go onto the USEF Safety Committee at the January USEF meeting with the blessing of the USEA and USEF Technical Committee.
Carol is leaving the USEA Board after this year and she, along with all of the departing members, deserve our thanks for their service over the past few years.
Marjorie Molloy — Organizers — Xentry Discussion — The Board took 10-15 minutes to discuss the issue of a lack of comparability between paper entries, EventEntries.com, and the USEA’s Xentry. Riders gave feedback about ways to improve Xentry and organizers, such as Steve Symansky, explained that a big issue is the lack of compatibility for organizers who use the Event Entries software to be able to import Xentry entries.
Go eventing.
