April Statement:
Fellow Members,
Four years ago, many of you elected me to join the Executive Board. My only interest was to serve chess nationally as faithfully as I had done locally in Northeast Florida and then for the entire state as President.
As a new member at-large, I wanted to learn the culture and show myself as an effective team member while quickly understanding issues and offering my leadership, project, and professional experiences. The board received me warmly and appreciated my involvement. I spent significant time directly engaging and listening to our members around the country as a player, tournament director, event organizer, Vice-President (twice), and our Organization’s President. I have been recommended by the Nominating Committee and I humbly ask for your vote to continue to serve you on the E.B.
May Statement:
I would like to take up a portion of my space to encourage anyone taking the time to read our candidate statements to ensure you can vote for any candidate. With US Chess, voting is only possible on an opt-in basis before June 1st. Of the nearly 40,000 members who are 16 and older members, about 4,000 have requested to vote. Select the options for registration in your dashboard or email Click here to show email address to become a voting member.
These last four years have been my most involved, and I have had a keen focus on delivering chess activity, policies, leadership, and making connections. However, in this article, I would like to give a few examples of how I worked to deliver better chess while on the board.
I requested to be the committee liaison for the States & Affiliates Committee (SAC) in my first board meeting. I really wanted to make an impact on SAC as a priority. I had been on that committee and knew there were a lot of backlog cases. The new Co-Chairs and I drafted a plan of action to address the bottleneck, and they executed the plan so well that SAC was named the Committee of the Year.
The next two years as Vice-President allowed me to take on the challenge of working on the District of Columbia state chapter selection as Chair of a Delegate Appointed Committee. The work was high profile and high risk as we needed to ensure the voices of the people in D.C. would be represented. There were known principles who wanted to become the state chapter, but we also reached out to every US Chess member in the district and then conducted interviews to create a 14-person Interim Board who, under our guidance, carried out deliberations to establish a new state chapter. The work was challenging, but it was completely in line with my professional experience. The final output was a report presented to the delegates at the 2024 Annual Meeting to assist in the state chapter selection.
Why tell you this? My experience on the board has been that we need a team of people who bring high-quality skill sets that complement the work required. I’m thankful that we have had chess people who are project leaders, attorneys, tech/software leaders, entrepreneurs, and professional managers on the board during my tenure. I ask for your vote to continue to work for you as part of this high-caliber team.
