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.
June Statement:
Four years ago the Executive Board’s (E.B.) Nominating Committee interviewed me and later asked me to consider running. Prior to that, the thought of being on the E.B. was not on my mind and I was already very busy in Florida.
The eight-person committee interview was very professional and required me to explain my experience and skillset to obtain a vision of how I might help the board with our organization’s mission. They did not evaluate my desire or passion to be on the Board. I did not have any burning issue, but they assessed my impact would be positive for American chess on the whole and the Executive Board, in particular.
Personally, I had no idea, I would be on the floor at the FIDE World General Assembly speaking to continue sanctions for Russia and Belarus or asked to give an opening address at the World Rapid and Blitz Championship in NYC. I also developed close personal connections with players, office staff, state delegates or various federations as your President. In short, our Executive Board needs to have people with those skills in addition to a passion for chess.
This year, the nominating committee has endorsed only four of the five candidates. This committee was selected/approved by your Board of Delegates. Many of them could serve us well as Executive Board members themselves, yet they work faithfully to identify people with the skills to take our organization to the next level by evaluating the collective needs of our professional governance team. I trust their judgement.
This year our Board concluded detailed strategic planning. Happily, most of what other candidate statements contain is already in the plan. I’m sure they have to help deliver items they already support.
Three-Year Strategic Plan
Culture - Focus on supporting our office staff to provide improved customer service with the aim of satisfying member expectations. (Focus: IT improvement, customer engagement, 501(c) mission deliverance and event goals).
Governance - We have fully staffed the operations side and need to implement change with support for affiliates and tame the appeals process flow. (Focus: Gov Task Force v.2.0, committee overhaul, strengthen States/Affiliates actions and streamline appeals process)
Sustainability- Our infrastructure continues to lag even with a constant state of IT projects. We have to commit to continuous IT improvement. Gameplay and data management are inseparable today, we need to fund it. (Focus: New serve Go-Live after SN, proactive recruiting VIP and other Int/External Sponsorships, benchmarking field leaders and strengthen partnerships with online platforms)
Passion for chess? We all have it. Even with my commitments, I managed to play 160 games (70 regular) in the last twelve months. Alas, my win percentage says I probably should not have. I even obtained my first FIDE rating in Budapest. The thing that matters most once on the board is the skillsets brought and willingness to use them to better our beloved game.
Again, I ask for your vote to continue the good work already underway.
