Board Notes – 8/15/16

At the request of our members the TRU Board will be releasing their monthly board call minutes and notes. View all of the archived minutes or read on for the most recent notes:

• Roll Call (8:05pm)

• Parker
• Butch
• Young
• Turner
• Corrigan
• Tomsak
• James
• Tate
• Yeoman (Guest)
• Approve minutes from last call
  • Turner: Motion to accept the minutes as they are.
  • Tomsak: Second.
  • Tate: Any discussion or opposition to accepting the minutes as they are? NONE. Approved.
• Follow Ups from last call
  • Nominations
    • Young: Posted all 3 nominations for TRU Board seat and Congress. Have received two nominations for Men’s D1 so far. Open until after the AGM.
      • D1: Dodge, Taute
      • Women’s: None
        • Tate: Nick are you interested in continuing?
        • James: Yes.
        • Turner: Tulsa women would like to nominate Nick James for women’s rep.
      • Congress: None
        • Tate: Wendy, since you’re going onto the USA Rugby payroll for your GU Admin payment, you would need to relinquish your Congress seat and can’t be nominated again.
        • Young: Yes, we’ve talked about this and I’m happy to meet this requirement.
        • Tate: Good, the goal is to have Wendy on USA Rugby payroll starting Sept 1, 2016. The burden of taxes and such would then fall on USA Rugby. Since we’ve already talked about this before, I don’t think we need a vote or anything on this. But is there any other discussion that we’d like to have?
          • Tomsak: No, we’ve had plenty of discussion and I feel good moving forward.
          • Young: Great, then I’ll include a 2 year congress seat in the nominations
• Summit
  • Courses
    • L200 – 20 (FULL)
    • L300 – 9 (FULL)
    • Referee – 7
    • Admin – 25
    • TJ – 15
  • Players (to help with L300)
    • Tate: I saw the email that we’re still looking for players to help with drills.
    • Young: Yes, we still need help on both days!
    • Tate: Ok, I will see if I can help with getting some interest.
      • Tomsak: Did we ever think of giving a stipend?
      • Tate: Yes, we offered that last year and we’re offering it again this year.
      • Tomsak: Can you send me the email? I didn’t get it.
      • Tate: We focused on the Dallas area and weren’t sure that this small stipend would help cover travel. What was the stipend we’ve offered?
      • Young: We kept the amount general so far.
      • Tate: Ok, are we comfortable with $50 per day?
      • Turner: That seems a little high for 2 ½ hours.
      • Tate: Ok, are you guys comfortable with giving Wendy and I the ability to choose an amount in order to entice players in the next few days?
      • Tomsak: I’m good with $50 for 2 days.
      • Tate: OK, we’ll make that happen, $100 max.
  • Location change
    • Tate: This year, the Griffins have had some upheaval and the main point of contact we had been working with is no longer there. We had requested an updated contact to continue coordinating the event but were not able to reach that person. With this and a few other factors, we weren’t comfortable with the idea of the venue falling through. So we proactively worked to find a backup location and luckily we were able to have it at the same hotel as the banquet. I informed Phil Camm on Saturday by email and we posted a notice on the TRU website today.
      • Parker: How does that affect the AGM?
      • Tate: It shouldn’t, we have a room at the hotel, right Wendy?
      • Young: Yes, everything moves to the hotel including the AGM.
      • Tomsak: And we have a field lined up for the courses that need that?
      • Tate: Yes, that was one of the pieces that we considered before moving. We have a field all set.
  • HOF
    • 93 spots RSVP’d / 64 paid
    • 7 of 10 nominees attending
• AGM
  • Agenda
    • Tate: I’d recommend that all reps take a close look at the agenda and see if there are any updates or items we’d like to cover?
    • Corrigan: I want to gauge everyone’s feelings on updating the bylaws, specifically the line that mentions “Board members are not allowed to receive compensation”. I believe that is outdated and time for Board members to receive compensation. I’d also recommend that we consider a 20% bonus for anyone that brought in a TRU Sponsorship.
    • Tate: Philosophically the notion that we need to start professionalizing the administration side of things, I do agree. What I would suggest is that this needs to be initiated by the membership and you as an outgoing Board member wanted to propose this under new business at the AGM, that is great. Just knowing our membership, if we propose this, it could be counter productive.
    • Corrigan: OK, I’ll run this by the D1 and D2 clubs to see what they think.
• New Club
  • DARC (W)
    • Tate: We did an email roll call and had 4 yes votes. Is there any additional votes or discussion at this time? Any objections? None. APPROVED.
• RRRC 7s Administrative Fees
  • Bonobo didn’t attend 7/23
  • Phantom 7s didn’t attend 7/9
    • Tate: This team was very professional and alerted the 7s directors weeks in advance. I don’t think they would object to paying the fee though.
  • Quins didn’t attend 6/25 or 7/23
    • Indicated early on that they were a non-qualifying team. No fee necessary.
  • HEB didn’t attend 7/23
  • Ft Hood didn’t attend 6/25 or 7/23
  • HARC (W) didn’t attend 6/25
  • Austin Blacks confirmed for 6/25, paid and requested a refund from the tournament host. Second tournament they signed up and no showed.
    • Corrigan: We should talk about this as the Blacks had a huge impact on the 7s series and caused havoc. This is one of our top clubs and we shouldn’t let this slide.
    • Tate: First off, Alan was mortified with what his club did. He had instructed his club to handle it appropriately and it wasn’t. We do have the 15s policy for match fees for no show or forfeit, so we can probably use that as a starting point.
  • Fees
    • Corrigan: I motion that we assess each club $250 per the published competitions 7s policy. **
    • Tomsak: Second
    • Tate: Any discussion or objections? None. APPROVED.
• New Business
  • USA Rugby Club 7s
    • Tate: I’m not sure if you were following Club 7s this weekend, but our teams didn’t perform (except for ARPTC who got 3rd). It shows that our RRRC 7s isn’t currently preparing our teams for the next level. This is a RRRC thing (competitions) but development is part of the TRU. I talked with Julie McCoy about doing a 7s version of the Summit that we are doing this weekend? Basically an event where we could bring in 7s coaches and referees together to raise the level of our game. This would be late May in 2017.
    • Young: Is it also because the top men and women’s teams at Nationals are either NDA, ODA or select sides? Are we falling behind because of that?
    • Tate: We talked a little bit about that and Julie had some thoughts on that too. If you talk to Scion, they train Tues/Thur and play on Saturdays. They aren’t in a full time environment yet.
    • Turner: I would recommend that everyone in the TRU attend Parrot 7s each year as we have several teams that come in from Frontier etc.
    • Tate: What’s the tournament date of that?
    • Turner: Second week of July, between 6/25 and 7/23 events. I’d also recommend that the RRRC get the 7s schedule out sooner so that we can schedule events with other regions. Frontier is sending out their schedule in January.
    • Tomsak: I also feel like the qualifiers were up and down in terms of attendance.
    • Young: They were actually about the same.
    • Tate: But outside the RRRC, we could probably say that participation has declined.
    • Butch: Yes, I completely support the 7s focus we’d love to be involved.
    • Turner: I’d like to make a recommendation but I feel like May is too late. We’ve already identified that this is a different clientele so why would we wait until May? I think we need to do it in January, let’s get those people that are focusing on 7s year round. I would propose that we do a better job of scheduling the Winter AGM and hold the 7s round table in conjunction.
    • Young: I agree!
    • Corrigan: I concur with January.
    • Tate: So I think the next step is to bring this up at the AGM and discuss with the membership.
• Meeting adjourned at 9:25pm
  • Turner: Motion to close
  • Corrigan: Second

**Originally the motion from Doug Corrigan said ALL clubs; this is misleading as his intent and the TRU Boards was that the clubs that committed to RRRC 7s but failed to show at all three events would be fined (per the RRRC 7s Competition Guidelines). This would include Bonobos, HEB, Ft Hood and HARC.