Mid month updates

I feel this is gonna be a ramble... apologies.

I was invited to join our club board for the next 3 seasons. The voting would have been next month but it would have been a formality. I accepted and then removed my interest. I've got to read lots of the club documents and participated in a introductory meeting. I didn't like what I saw. The club was historically a social ice dancing club and it's run by the same people. They run it in a friendly manner, holding one board meeting per year and not checking on each other and not updating their scope and mission. The think is that now, from the 200 members of the club, 150 are junior members (under 18) interested in testing, 30 members are parents and coaches and 20 are the good old ice dancers. The club offers 5 testing sessions per year (far from enough) but has an ice dance session each week, that losses big money. Practically the junior members sponsor the ice dance sessions... Because the treasurer was on vacation, nobody was able to explain the financial statements to me. It looks like they never analyze them as a board. They don't know how much money they are losing... Plus there is a total luck of transparency in everything related to the club. And they didn't even seem to realize that this is not how things should be done. And they seemed set to continue doing them as they always did them... Well, I lost lots of time, energy and it seems I upset few people.

With the idea that I'll be involved with the board I helped with the last testing session. There were many interesting things catching my attention but  I'll mention  just 2. I saw 3 Pre-juvenile MITF tests (the ones that I'm gonna test next) and I guessed right that 2 passed and one didn't. The one that didn't did everything right but with no power. It looked not confident. I think that's gonna help me for my test.

The second thing worth mentioning is that I've met the judges. There wasn't a long discussion, but as I mentioned I wanted to be more involved in the skating world (like volunteering for that test sessions), one of them said that there is a big need for judges and I should become a trial judge. There were two trial judges present at that sessions and 3 judges. I don't totally understand the process quite yet but the idea is that you are registered with the USFSA to be a trial judge and you go and judge tests that then get send by the test chair together with copies from the real judges test forms to a judge that is your mentor. The mentor judge explains the trial judge the right ways of judging and keeps track of the trial judge progress. There are many requirements to be completed (classes, numbers of test sessions attended, numbers of tests judged, percentage of tests judged similarly with the real judge and more...).

And the most important thing, my skating! Skating... is good. I'm working almost exclusively at Pre-juvenile MITF. It's kind of decided that I'll test on end of June, but today my coach will sign the application, that will make it real.