What is the role of the USCF?
Right now, some of the major things the USCF does include:
* Publishes 2 magazines (Chess Life and Chess Life for Kids), maintains a website and a national rating system, etc.
To pay for the above tasks, the USCF charges for memberships. The USCF also receives money from profits of national events, fees or percentages of the concessions at the national events, fees for rating games, fees from USCF book and equipment sales and advertising, etc.
However, the USCF could no longer afford to hold the US Championship or the US Women’s Championship. Therefore, that was turned over to the AF4C. The USCF could also no longer afford to send teams to the Olympiad. That is now also outsourced through sponsors.
So where does the money go? How come the USCF is losing so much money, even without paying for the US and US Women’s Championship and Olympiad teams? The USCF does little to promote itself. It does little to help our young players improve. It does little for our chess professionals. It also does little to help local clubs or organizers.
– What do you think are the problems?
– What areas would you like to see the USCF improve?
– How do you propose to improve and fix the problems?
What should be the role of the USCF?
If we cannot fund many of the events, should the USCF clean its image and try to seek sponsorships for them?
Should the USCF relinquishes some of the responsibilities and let other major chess organizations assume them?
Or should we maintain the attitude (of some of the current board members) that if the members do not like how things are done, they can walk and the professional chess players can find their own money for the privilege to represent the US? (Here is one of the quotes from a USCF Executive Board members: “If they want to go at their own expense or at the expense of the organizers we would be more than willing to authorize them to represent the USA.”)
People like Sloan and his friends are the problem. On top of that, the old guards like Goichberg and Schultz have no new ideas. Changes are needed to make things better. Get rid of the old guards and elect the new guards.
The USCF is an incompetent organization. Time to organize a new one.
Have the scholastic numbers exploded in the last 20 years in spite of the USCF? I think the USCF has done quite a bit for scholastic chess. As for clubs and organizations the USCF is a stable organization that maintains continuity when local clubs fold. Years later when someone wants to start up again they don’t have to reinvent the wheel, it is already there in the form of the USCF. Is the USCF perfect? I would say no. It there something better waiting to replace it?
Who would want to sponsor the USCF with a convicted felon on the executive board?
The growth of scholastic chess has nothing to do with the USCF.
Susan,
I think that the USCF as a non-profit should strive to make expenses match up with income as much as possible. However, the board needs to determine an appropriate level of tolerance, say 5-10% over or under budget each year.
I think the USCF’s roles are the following:
1) To maintain the rating structure and operations.
2) To govern rated events through the rule book and having competent TD’s run events.
3) To encourage and support scholastic events.
4) To maintain chess as an enjoyable hobby for the majority of us that provides intellectual and personal development.
5) To find ways to maintain that those of us who are at the upper echelons of the game are able to make a reasonable livelihood at it.
Susan:
The USCF should use an actual bidding process for all events to find the best option for chess.
A winning bid can be a multi-year bid however there needs to be performance clauses for contingency management.
The USCF, while they may have competent people doing their jobs, are not organizers and it is quite appparant they cannot raise money on their own.
The budget for the USCF should also include monies to have the men’s, women’s and junior champion represent the US internationally. This also includes the teams as well. Other countries do this, even in those countries where the government doesn’t back the sport.
It is stupid that anyone would suggest that a player needs to go out and get their own sponsors to they can go represent the US in an international tournament.
Joe – you do not want to run a not-for-profit at break-even as you stated.
A not-for-profit can have an operating surplus and many do. There is not IRS guideline that says you have to expend everything.
Not-for-profits cannot post a profit and cannot personally innure the directors but can have an operating surplus and it can be carried over from year to year.
It’s fine for professionals to go get their own sponsorships. The problem is the USCF doesn’t allow this. The politicians want to control everything.
“Joe – you do not want to run a not-for-profit at break-even as you stated.
A not-for-profit can have an operating surplus and many do. There is not IRS guideline that says you have to expend everything.”
Anonymous,
I agree with you, but I think I was rather conservative in my comment. My perspective in my previous comment was that I think in the short-term it would be nice if the USCF were not bleeding money. If they could build their fund year after year and do great things with it, I would be thrilled!
I’m sorry but I really must take issue with some of the comments that I’m seeing.
First of all, Susan’s quote of Sam Sloan was just one EB member’s opinion — hardly the official position. Further, in Sloan’s defense (I can’t believe I’m saying this) this was ONE off-the-cuff remark when being told about a new tournament (that we haven’t even been officially notified of yet) that wasn’t budgetted, that’s coming up in just a few months, and that hits the USCF as we’re just recovering financially. Maybe some national organizations (that get government funding) will have no problem attending such an event, but when the budget is already stretched tight at the USCF (funded primarily through memberships) it’s a different situation.
Second issue: Anonymous said…
“The growth of scholastic chess has nothing to do with the USCF.” This is a lie that’s becoming all too prevalent and I’m not going to sugar-coat this — it IS a lie. When I first started teaching chess as a volunteer, I wouldn’t have had a clue where to begin if it weren’t for the help I got from the USCF. More recently, my own daughter has begun to play. The biggest inspiration she got was when Susan Polgar autographed her book and spoke to her briefly at a USCF national event (thanks Susan! she made her way through the entire book thanks to your encouragement). My understanding is that Susan’s appearance was PAID FOR by the USCF.
The USCF is made up of a lot of volunteers that work very hard and contribute a lot of their own time to help scholastic players get started. To dismiss all of the hard work all these people have done (as part of the USCF!) is just outrageous. Whoever said that should probably REMAIN anonymous out of shame!
The USCF has a bunch of morons on the executive board.
That tournament that hit us at a bad time was mention during the Fide meetings in May. Check the minutes.
So while USCF has not been officially notified, USCF should have been prepared for the possibility of the tournament springing up.
The USCF has very little influence over chess in America, thanks to people like Sloan.
tanstaafl:
who else other that bill goichberg on the EB can actually organize a tournament? randy hough i would guess but no one else.
who from the employee base can? walter browne sure. jerry nash maybe. but 90% of the staff couldn’t do it. the remaining 10% have so many other things to do they can’t take the time to organize events and do their uscf job.
hence why it events should be outsourced. a compensation mechanism should exist where the organizer does pay uscf some fee (nominal to high depending on the event) for having the event awarded.
The financial reports of the USCF are on-line.
For the most recent financial year, ending May 31, 2006, the USCF had $2.95 million in revenue. Somewhat more than half of this was from membership fees. Another half-million was income from running tournaments. And there was about $600,000 in revenue from sales of the magazine, and other “services”.
Where did the money go?
The magazines account for about a million, the tournaments cost $660,000 (about $130,000 more than they made). General and administrative expenses, “overhead”, and “governance” came to nearly a million, nearly a third of the total expenses.
In the 2006 fiscal year, there was $130,00 deficit of expenses over revenue, a deficit of about 7-8%.
For myself, all I want from the USCF is that it rates tournament games. My membership fee works out to about $1 to $2 per rated game that I play. That is too much, especially when I’m already paying to enter the tournaments. I’m not interested in the magazine, which basically sucks. And I’m not interested in subsidizing national tournaments that I don’t play in.
I’d be willing to pay a small tax on top of my tournament entry fees to have an organization that represents the U.S in international chess, if international chess weren’t even more of cesspool than the USCF.
So, seeing a third of the money going to the magazines and a third going for admin, overhead, and governance meetings makes me feel that my membership fee is wasted.
Anonymous said “For myself, all I want from the USCF is that it rates tournament games.”
I’ve heard comments like this before, and I’m sorry but I just ran out of patience with such views. The USCF does MANY things to support chess and just because you don’t notice them, just because they’re not done right in front of your nose, you tend to trivialize them and underrate their importance. It costs a lot of money, time (mostly volunteer), and effort to do the things an organization like the USCF does.
The USCF:
1. Maintains the rules of chess, including tournament rules. (This includes answering hundreds of phone calls and emails about the rules of chess each month, including questions from non-members.)
2. Maintains the national rating system, including top player lists.
3. Certifies TDs. (even organizations that run non-USCF rated events often want USCF-certified TDs working at them.)
4. Publishes several magazines.
5. Maintains a website that now has daily (or almost so) updates on chess news, features, etc.
6. Participates in FIDE, including sending representatives to around a dozen international events each year and sanctioning FIDE events held in the USA.
7. Recognizes state and local champions, holds national events and awards numerous national championship titles.
8. Prepares numerous pamphlets and flyers on chess.
9. Helps promote local events with ad space in national magazines, online ads, mailing lists of players, etc.
10. Runs correspondence events, including the Golden Knights, an event that attracts an international audience.
11. And many, many other things as well.
You say you don’t WANT all this? Then I respectfully suggest you shop ELSEWHERE. The USCF is NOT a rating service. “USCF is a not-for-profit membership organization devoted to extending the role of chess in American society. USCF promotes the study and knowledge of the game of chess, for its own sake as an art and enjoyment, but also as a means for the improvement of society.” (from the USCF Mission Statement)
When you join the USCF you’re not just buying a “ratings service” you’re agreeing to support the USCF’s mission. Again, it this isn’t for you, fine. Please feel free to shop elsewhere. The USCF probably has the the best chess ratings system in the world, but it’s NOT FOR SALE SEPARATELY. If you want it, you get all the other thing the USCF does for chess included in your purchase.
I can’t shop elsewhere. Basically, you are forced to join the USCF if you want a national rating. It is a monopoly.
If the USCF unbundled the rating service from the rest and allowed people to simply pay so much per game for rating services along with tournament entry fees (leaving aside the fact that tournament organizers already pay per-game rating fees), how many members do you suppose the USCF would have?
The USCF fee is, in essence, a tax on tournament chess players, which is then squandered.
One can list a few good things that the USCF does, but those good things aren’t mainly what the USCF spends money on.
What it mainly spends membership fees on are a useless magazine, a big office staff that does vague stuff, and travel and meetings for chess politicians.
The things you list are mostly in the category of “Membership Development”, and those totaled in 2006 to $289,000 most of which was “Personnel”, meaning salaries. The web site if $5000 per year. All “Membership Development” represents less than 10% of the expenditures.
What you are doing here is what people typically do when they try to defend the USCF — make a laundry list of “good things” which the USCF puts a small amount of money into. But you only have to read the financial reports to see that this is window-dressing.
To: Anonymous, I can’t shop eleswhere…
Bravo !!!
Re the USCF, it would be helpful to have a breakdown of these broad categories of expenses; e.g. for general and administrative expenses, which expenses (or accounts), what is the amount of each such expense; for ‘magazine’ what types of magazine expenses? it is possible to bury all kinds of expenses, including (as a hypothetical example) executive compensation, entertainment, etc. etc.
Don’t be silly. Of course you can shop elsewhere. There’s at least one for-profit company that provides a rating service. All you have to do is convince the other chess players in your area to use this other service instead of the USCF…
What? You can’t do that? Do the other players in your area actually support the USCF?
Well, you can always get a rating by playing over the internet…
I’m sorry, but this subject has been discussed to death on the USCF Issues forum and you’re not saying anything that hasn’t already been thoroughly debunked.
For example talking about the large amount of money that’s spent on EB member travel — it’s hardly a drop in the bucket, it seems to me. The EB (and some other chess figures) had a “retreat” last year to do some strategic planning and other work — the TOTAL price tag to the USCF? Under $10K (not per person, TOTAL). Consider how much work the EB members do for the USCF — some of these people spend as much as 20 hour per week working on things for the USCF and don’t get a single dime in compensation. Some of them even pay for their own travel expenses (essentially donating the cost to the USCF) and you complain about the tiny amount of money we spend so that they can just do their job? These aren’t vacations the EB members are going on, after all.
Your claim that the USCF basically taxes tournament chess players, pretty much debunked as well. For example, the USCF probably charges LESS for rating tournament games than it COSTS the USCF if you include all of the things that go into the rating system — all the work the ratings committee does for example (again, unpaid volunteers, but I’m sure they have SOME expenses and they need IT support for their work). Regular tournament chess players get far more OUT of the USCF than non-tournament players. They pay no more for their memberships than non-tournament players. And MOST adult members DON’T regularly play in tournaments.
The magazine expense — here I think we should be able to save a large amount of money that we aren’t. Many magazines pay for themselves from advertising revenues. Recently we tried to GIVE AWAY advertising space to bring in new advertisers. Nobody took us up on it. The companies didn’t want to be associated with the USCF. Maybe with some changes on the EB (one PARTICULAR change) and some good PR people (like you’ll find on Susan’s slate) we can fix that. Until then, get used to the USCF spending a lot of money on the magazine. It’s a necessary tool to retain members — every national membership organization that I know of has a magazine and they AREN’T optional. Why? Because if you don’t stay in regular contact with your members, you WILL lose them.
The “bloated” office staff that does “vague things”? Unless you’ve run a successful multi-million dollar business, you have no idea how much overhead you’re going to run into. Sorry, but it’s just a fact of life that you have to do bookkeeping, pay taxes, process memberships (membership cards don’t just mail themselves), keep track of employee benefits, etc. And our office staff is hardly overpaid. The rest of that “vague stuff” — things like certifying TDs, processing tournament reports, investigating ethics complaints about TDs or cheating players, maintaining the MSA pages, etc — mostly for the benefit of TOURNAMENT players.
It just seems to me that many of the anonymous posters just want a “free lunch”. Well “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”.
— tanstaafl
Tanstaafl, of course any organization needs bookkeeping, pays some taxes, although less than a for-profit corporation, pay employee benefits (the nature and extent of which are not disclosed on the financial statements), etc. etc. I have business experience too, and while certain core expenses obviously occur, the nature and extent of these expenses, along with their economy and efficiency can’t be determined by looking at the amorphous expense categories displayed on the web financial statements. The unbrella categories on the financial statements disclose almost no real information that would be of use to someone seeking a sophisticated analysis of the inflow and outflow of financial resources.
Nonsense. The whole rating operation could be run on the web site with the tournament directors doing most of the data entry. Many rating reports are already uploaded. At most one person is needed to run the entire rating system, and I doubt it would even be one full time person. There aren’t that many rated players or rated games. It isn’t a big application. If you can’t find someone to do it efficiently, put it out to bid.
As for the magazine, discontinue it. Who needs it? Most of the million doesn’t go to pay for editorial content, anyway but for printing and mailing it out. Have you heard of this thing called the World Wide Web? If you insist on a magazine, look at Chess Horizons, which is far better than Chess Life and is run by volunteers for the Massachusetts Chess Association, which charges $6 per year. (And publishing the magazine isn’t the only thing they do.)
Some of the other things you mention should be done by volunteers. I bet if you simply stopped doing a lot of the stuff done by the staff, nobody would notice, or volunteers would step forward to do those things. Possibly other voluteer organizations would take them over.
Run national tournaments so that they at least break even. If they can’t cover their costs, then get sponsors to subsidize them, charge higher entry fees, or don’t run them. Why should membership fees subsidize tournaments?
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of things to improve. (I’ve SEEN a lot of improvement already — things are MUCH better than they were). We do need better break-outs of our expenses. I agree that the members shouldn’t be subsidizing MOST national tournaments. Some of the “subsidizing” probably IS called for, however. I wouldn’t object to the USCF helping with the armed services championship or the national blind championship for example (I have no idea if we do because, as “anonymous” said, the expenses aren’t broken out by tournaments). We probaby MAKE some money at the national scholastics.
I’m not absolutely sure that some of the expense for the US Open doesn’t actually go to the delegates meetings, workshops, and things like that. Those expenses are supposed to be separate but I can’t tell how good a job they’re doing.
Keep in mind that we just RECENTLY hired a CFO. I expect the financial reporting to get MUCH better.
As for the cost of rating events? It’s easy to minimize the actual costs of something when you don’t understand everything that goes into it. It’s a lot more than just applying a formula to the reported results.
Previously, I supported the idea of making the magazine subscription optional. It’s a major expense and I just don’t get that much out of it myself. I’ve been convinced that I was wrong. I’m now convinced that the only way to have a reasonable retention rate for our members is have a monthly magazine. The only way I’d go along with the magazine being optional is if it were replaced with some other regular communication. I get plenty of regular contact out of my ICC “membership”, for example. Now if we bundled ICC membership with a magazine-less USCF subscription then you’d have something. The web based magazine or an e-mail based communication simply isn’t enough to insure that the members actually SEE what the USCF sent them. Without this positive contact on a regular basis, it’s just too easy to let the membership lapse.
I hope I haven’t swamped this discussion with my own views — this just hits a sore spot with me because of similar recent discussions on the Forums.
When, Beatriz Marinello cut the USCF staff
a few years ago by 17 people, I was amazed. Not that positions were being eliminated, but that the staff was big enough to be cut by 17 people.
From the financial reports, it seems the personnel expense in the 2006 financial year was about $800K out of the total expenses of $3 million.
How many staff people are there now, anyway, and what do they all do? What is the average cost per staff person, including salary, fringes, office space, etc?
good discussion here.
How does Chess Horizons get published at such a low cost. Wow. $6 per year for membership with magazine.
I dont mind the present membership cost of USCF. I think it is reasonable. However, the money seems to get stolen every year. it just disappears into thin air.
You can talk about cheating at chess but what about cheating at bookkeeping the USCF books. Where does the money go. $3 million is a huge operating budget. Something is wrong with the money.
Like they say. Follow the money trail. That will show you what is happening.
What do volunteers have to do with anything? I would hope it is without pay otherwise they are employees. Volunteers or victims?
VOLUNTEER:
a] To perform or offer to perform a service of one’s own free will.
b] To do charitable or helpful work without pay.
VICTIM
a] An unfortunate person who suffers from some adverse
circumstance.
b] A person who is tricked or swindled.
How can the USCF find corporate sponsors to donate money to chess when corporate companies will not even accept free advertising from uscf because they do not want to be associated with uscf.
Something smells. There is a rotten apple in the barrel.
Right – you could out source much of what the USCF staff does to places like Costa Rica or India. Infact the IT support would be comparable there as well as the printing and adressing. Big corporations are doing this all the time in the USA. All you would need is a few contact people in the USA to run errands, etc…
Maybe we need to run a for profit company. If I was owner of a for profit company I would never allow the USCF to overspend the income. It is all common sense. Do not spend any money unless you have the cash in your pocket first and all your bills are paid. Does not take a genius to figure it out.
I don’t know the finances of MACA, which publishes Chess Horizons, but I’m sure part of the equation is that it is all volunteers. By the way, the $6.00 membership of MACA was in my mind because I recently signed up my daughter, and that was a Junior membership. The Adult membership is $12.00. I apologize for the error.
The point is not to outsource the USCF staff activity to India, or somewhere. The point is to have a small, very professional staff that is doing things that can only be done by professionals working full-time, on such things as Marketing and Public Relations, Editorial, and web site development, All the rest should either not be done, should be done by volunteers (or other organizations), or should be contracted out. I can’t see any reason whatsoever for the USCF to have a large staff.
On another point, if the USCF is really Chess Life Publishing, Inc, and its members are really print magazine subscribers, then at least they ought to be getting a *good* print magazine for their money. I can subscribe to 28 issues of Newsweek per year for $25.00, and that organization also publishes an excellent free web-site.
But surely print magazines aren’t going to continue being viable for more than another decade or two. I can’t believe that the future of chess in the U.S. depends on the USCF continuing to publish a lousy magazine, or any magazine at all, for that matter.
We should look at how national chess organizations operate in Europe. For example, France, with a national population of about 50 million has the Federation Francais d’Echecs (FFE). it has about 50,000 members. In proportion to the population, this is about 3 times as many as the USCF. An FFE “license”, which permits entry into tournaments and membership in chess clubs, currently costs about 40 Euros, but a large part of this is rebated to regional leagues and local clubs. About 15 years ago I was a member of FFE, and I can’t recall if there was a magazine. If so, it wasn’t much of one and wan’t a major selling point. People joined the FFE through their chess clubs, or perhaps when they entered tournaments. In those days, if you lived in France and wanted to subscribe to a chess magazine, you’d subscribe to Europe d’Echecs, which was independently published, and was a vastly better magazine than Chess Life. One advantage of it being independently published was that it gave an independent view of FFE goings-on.
Actually, it would be good for the US to have a decent chess magazine, one that also that had reasonable web site. I’d like to see the USCF abandon the chess magazine niche so that someone competent could publish a good one.
anonymous said “When, Beatriz Marinello cut the USCF staff a few years ago by 17 people, I was amazed. Not that positions were being eliminated, but that the staff was big enough to be cut by 17 people.” This is easy to understand when you consider we had farmed out the B&E business — that was a lot of staff no longer needed.
anonymous said “You can talk about cheating at chess but what about cheating at bookkeeping the USCF books. Where does the money go. $3 million is a huge operating budget. Something is wrong with the money.” No, I don’t really think there is anything wrong with the books. A large amount of the money is simple to account for: postage for the magazine, tournament expenses, and staff costs probably make up most of it.
anonymous said “Right – you could out source much of what the USCF staff does to places like Costa Rica or India. Infact the IT support would be comparable there as well as the printing and adressing.” 1. Given the number of hours Mike Nolan works, our “IT Support” probably makes less than minimum wage :). 2. You have to send in TLA announcements too far in advance NOW — if you moved the printing out of the country it’d only get worse. My personal opinion is that we should only outsource “non-core” parts of our “business”. One obvious example is the B&E business. Service to our members is NOT a good candidate for outsourcing. I have yet to see a business outsource customer relations without a BIG drop in the level of service.
anonymous said “Something smells. There is a rotten apple in the barrel.” Yes, I agree. And he’s on the EB. But he’s only one person. I think most of the EB are hard-working honest people that really care about the USCF and its mission. Hopefully, this next election will take care of the one rotten apple.
anonymous said “It is all common sense. Do not spend any money unless you have the cash in your pocket first and all your bills are paid.” Absolutely right. The USCF’s books are on an accrual basis (because we need to account for deferred income and expenses) but we really need to do a better job of watching our CASH. EB member Joel Channing is making some great progress on this matter in spite of resistance from a certain OTHER EB member. Of course, it’s a little like closing the barn door after the horse is already gone, but at least we won’t lose any more livestock. (and don’t blame Joel for the past loses — he wasn’t involved in USCF politics back then).
The USCF staff IS relatively small for the amount of work the USCF gets done. The HUGE bulk of the work is done by volunteers. The professional staff in the USCF office is probably about as small as it can be and still get the work done. Of course if we stopped wasting their time with silly “investigations” of things like whether all the candidates paid filing fees in 2005 (something Sam Sloan wanted to investigate — they did, BTW) or what Susan Polgar did for each of the checks she received from the USCF over the past X years (another famous Sam Sloan inquiry) then maybe the staff could get caught up on some of their normal tasks.
But you didn’t answer my question on how big the staff is, and how many are assigned to the various activities. This isn’t in the financial reports, though it should be. You seem to know this, so why not spill the beans? Let people decide for themselves whether the staff is doing enough to justify its size, once they know how big it is and how what people are being paid.
Also, besides the $800K being spent on personnel expenses, there is around $200K for professional fees. What is that?
I think it would be better to defer the question of the exact staff breakout to somebody with more knowledge. I can tell you they all seemed very busy when I visited, but I’d rather somebody that actually works for the USCF to give you the exact count and break-out by task. (I can probably tell you what quite a few of them do, but I’d rather not take a chance on making a mistake). Somebody from the finance committee might be willing and able to provide more info than I can.
The professional fees are for a variety of things. Lawyer’s fees, auditor’s fees, etc. make up a small part of it. We only recently hired a CFO, so the work that would be done by a CFO was done by an outside accountant. I assume Mike Nolan’s consulting fees (for IT work) are part of this as well. We also use contractors for some other positions — event planning and at least one position working on the magazine, for example. In fact, we do so much using contractors, this sounds like too small a number. If we were paying normal, going rates for IT work it would have taken almost the entire amount (if not more) just for that. So either the USCF is getting some unusually low rates (my guess) or some things aren’t being included that I’d expect.
I’m a little limited in what I can find out about this since individual employee and contractor pay rates are SUPPOSED to be confidential. This isn’t because of some deep conspiracy to rip-off the USCF membership! MOST people wouldn’t like their relatives, neighbors, friends (and complete strangers, for that matter) to be able to look on the internet and find out how much they make. Not to mention seeing a bunch of comments from people that don’t KNOW how hard they work criticizing them and talking about how much they’re overpaid.
Susan Polgar:
I am really angry with you! I AM UPSET!!! I’m steamed! (Grrr!)
I’ve been following the blog off and on throughout the day and there were some really nasty comments made in this post. So I spent some time this evening composing a masterful comment regarding how you’re letting your blog deteriorate to the level of the USCF Forums.
It was a literary masterpiece!
But just now as I pull up the page in my Internet Explorer and paste my work of art into the “Leave Your Comment” box from my WORD program, I find that you had deleted the nasty stuff right out. What kind of stunt is this? Whatever am I do with my tour de force now?
How am I to complain about how you administer your blog when you do the right thing? Gimme a break!
Alright! So now I am going to complain that you don’t leave me anything to complain about. That’s my complaint. (Grr!)
Jack
P.S. (Had you going there for a minute, didn’t I?)
P.S.S. But I really had written something really good, that I can’t use. Boo, hoo.
One thing odd in the financial reports is a “Credit Card Expenses” of about $65,000. Unless that is bank charges for the use of credit cards, that is a very unusual way of classifying expenses. It is sort of like having a line on the reports for “Things paid for on Tuesdays”. You could have a four-line financial report: “Cash Expenses”, “Credit Card Expenses”, “Check Expenses”, “Wire Transfer Expenses”.
The important thing isn’t how it was paid. The important thing is what it was. What is this really? Travel Expenses?
My understanding is that the credit card charges were charges we paid for processing credit card payments we received from members. This would include memberships and tournament entries paid by credit card. If, for example, we pay 0.30% as a fee to process credit card transactions and we receive $2,000,000 in credit card payments (I suspect MOST money received by the USCF today is from credit cards), that would work out to $60,000. I’m not sure exacly what rate we pay to process credit cards, but a rate of something like 0.30% + 25 cents per transaction would probably be in the right ball park.
tanstaafl,
I’ve read through some of the comments on this thread, and I appreciate your reasoned arguments and defense of what the USCF does right. Obviously there is plenty of room for improvement, but the USCF does plenty of good for chess.
We chess players seem to be a grumbly bunch, so I’m happy to hear some positive commentary! Thanks!
just a few thoughts from a german chess freak, I hope it is interesting to read.
I compare chess in the US always with europe and the USCF with the German Federation. You can’t compare everything 1:1 but a few remarks:
The USCF has a poor chess magazine, even when the Layout recently improved . Who wants to read articels 5 months after a tournament.
The USCF prevents activities by charging for all and everything from the TLA in Chess Live up to rating fees.
The German Federation has no own Magazine, but membership fee is much lower. Small Tournament announcements are free in commercial profitable magazins. It’s a selling point for them. Rating is free and supported by volunteers on all levels. Internet database is comparable to USCF.
Scholastic is doing well in the US, but nearly all players leave chess when they leave school. So scholastic is very important, but what the US needs is chess clubs, which do not die, when a key person leaves. Reason from my point of view is, that there is no identification with the club, because there is not much what holds the players together. They do not win and loose together.
US needs chess leagues on all levels, were club teams compete. Teams should be allowed to have any playing level (no rating limit), so there is a interest to teach players to improve or lure strong players to a club by interesting activities. Create competition ! Team matches should have a season of 9 months with one match a month.
I know there are some local chess leagues, but in Virginia is nothing. In my area live 2,5 Mio people and 1 chessclub. In a similar area in Germany are more than 80 clubs with about 250 teams of 8 players each, playing 9 matches a year on sundays. Most clubs have an annual chess open (some small some big). There is a regular chesslife.
THE USCF can’t do everything by themself but the foundation of chessclubs and creating of an identification with your club is a key initiative I would like to see.
The USCF can help to motivate the state federations, collect and distribute “best practices”, organize a annual tournament for the state club champions and many more. What works in Virginia or California, may not work in Kentucky. But who collects informations and makes them available.
The USCF chess league is a good start, but USCF needs a bottom up approach. Not only a top down.
membership will rise, some local sponsorship may be attracted, community life becomes an additional activity which may attract companies to settle in an area and many more benefits…
It’s a big challenge and will not happen over night, but it’s worth to persue.
Otherwise all good scholastic activities loose worth.