Board Call Notes – 12/14/15

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 12/14/15 notes:

  • Roll Call
    • Parker
    • Corrigan
    • Tate
    • Tomsak
    • James
    • Butch
    • Young
  • Public Board notes
    • Tate: Should we reveal notes as they exist or do we need to draft minutes for public consumption?
      • Tomsak: To save double work, I don’t see anything wrong with the notes at this time.
      • Corrigan: I agree
      • Young: What would be the time frame that we would release?
        • Tate: As this is a new endeavor, I would recommend starting with this year and go forward.
        • Tomsak: Yes, and I think a big interest is that people want to know how a rep votes.
        • Tate: Is there a motion to publish the 2015-2016 notes starting with this competitive cycle?
          • Parker: Motion.
          • Tomsak: Second.
            • Tate: Any other discussion? None. Any objections? None. APPROVED.
            • Young: Will post the notes after we finish tonight. Do you want them as a post (notice goes out to the Feedburner/news). Or as a page that they have to go to (page won’t send out notifications).
              • Tate: As a good practice, we should approve the minutes before posting. Let’s add in a step on our monthly calls to approve the past call’s minutes. We can also review action items, etc.
              • Young: We have board calls once a month, so possibly delayed by 30 days but could be posted sooner.
  • Phil Camm recommendations
    • ID Cards or enforce book check
      • Tate: Book check really isn’t our issue (TRU) as it has to do with eligibility. This falls under RRRC and specifically their sub-committee that was created. But, if we as a service of the membership want to spend the money on ID cards (instead of a book check), that could be done. Is this something we’d like to recommend?
        • Corrigan: I had proposed this as Phil Camm had brought it up a few times. I propose we work with Camm to see about pricing (he has a printer, etc) and then pass it on to the RRRC. Or we go with the current policy (book check) and do we enforce it?
          • Tate: We can’t enforce it as it has to do with eligibility. But if you’d like to kick this back to Phil and flesh out a proposal, let’s do that. (Corrigan)
    • #4s at all D1 matches
      • Tate: #4s would provide a more professional presentation and would assist the referees with substitutions, time and score. Would be a bonus to have all this pushed to CMS live as a service of the #4. I’d assume that we’d have to offer a stipend or some sort of payment system for this, so this would fall on the TRU.
        • Corrigan: Wendy, can you confirm if there is already a match reimbursement for TRRA as this is a service they can provide?
          • Young: Yes, $25 per match, no mileage.
          • Corrigan: The big question is, how do we get someone to do this? Do we even have three people in each city?
          • Tate: I think finding qualified individuals wouldn’t be hard, but it could be hard to find neutral ones. It would probably be best to have the home team provide and an established reimbursement.
          • Corrigan: I would like to propose a reimbursement and mileage at the current TRRA rate.
          • Tate: A little math, $25 a game, roughly 42 D1 games with some mileage, this would be a rough estimate of $1-2000. Do we want to add this to our budget? Bear in mind that lower clubs may request these service and the budget only gets bigger.
            • Corrigan: I think it’s really worthwhile and something we should absolutely do.
            • Butch: It’s a nice idea but I’m not sure if we’re there yet as a union. My questions would be, who’s responsible for assigning? Where’s the running list of the qualified individuals? Is the emphasis ARs vs a #4?
              • Young: I would also echo that, would you rather have qualified ARs first or #4s? #4s are great but if we have ARs that aren’t qualified…we’ve lost a big part of helping the referee.
              • Tate: We can’t put this entirely on the referee society at this point. If the TRU managed the #4s, would that be more of a help or more of a headache to the referee?
              • Young: It will absolutely help a referee, but we are still trying to get ARs on all D1 games. Are we putting the cart before the horse?
              • Tate: We have started the TJ/AR program, maybe we give that a season to see how that initiative works? Then we look to add the #4 next year? Any objections? None.
  • TJ/AR Shirts shipped!
    • Young: Should we post a reminder that teams should wear these?
    • Tate: Yes!
  • National Panel matches (billing)
    • Butch confirmed that the club department at USAR is billed for refs, not TRU.
  • Operating Procedures
    • Young: Alan was going to provide something? Anyone seen anything?
    • Tate: Haven’t seen anything but I did speak to him this evening and I will follow up.
  • Bylaws Voting (confirmed by Wendy and Luke)
    • 2/3 would need to be 35 clubs (58 clubs total)
    • 12 clubs voted, does not pass
      • 2 nos, 0 abstain
        • Young: Will post a notice that these didn’t pass.
        • Tate: Yes, we will discuss more at the Winter AGM. I did get some feedback from one club that was against one of the bylaw changes. I haven’t received any other feedback at this time.
  • Congress Club Rep Voting (confirmed by Kirk and Wendy)
    • Brignac (9) & Yeoman (9)
      • Counted second place votes, Yeoman wins 10-5. If Yeoman or Young can’t attend, Brignac is the alternate.
        • Young: Will post a notice and alert nominees by email. Will also let Yeoman know he can begin purchasing for 2016 NDS in San Francisco, CA.
      • Hughes (4) & Turgeon (1)
        • 23 total clubs voted
  • Americas Championships
    • USA v. Argentina, BBVA Compass Stadium – Saturday, February 6 at 7:00 p.m. CT
    • USA v. Canada, Dell Diamond Stadium – Saturday, February 13 at 6:00 p.m. CT
      • Tate: Would expect teams to reschedule or move matches up in the day so they can attend these matches. I’m talking with Alan (RRRC) to see if we can do a centralized adjustment to the schedule rather than one-offs.
  • Any other business?
    • Sponsor (Tate): Tim Howard of the Austin Blacks has started a new company called Ruck Science. They’ve proposed quarterly payments and would like advertising space on the website and included in a newsletter. He would also like PR surrounding the launch of this partnership to all CIPP players. I did let him know that we don’t “own” that list as USA Rugby manages it and so we declined that option. But we do have the feedburner and the all@texasrugbyunion.com (all Presidents, etc).
      • Tomsak: Anything that will help our teams in the long run seems to be the right thing for me. A lot of our players are already using his products.
      • Corrigan: Motion to approve.
      • Tomsak: Second.
        • Parker: Are we sure the products are safe?
        • Tomsak: The guys on my team have used them with no ill effects.
        • Tate: Any objections? None. APPROVED. Tomsak will communicate with Tim.
  • Budget
    • Tate: We discussed this on the last call but needed to add two items:
      • Summit: We spent $5,520.70. Added $8,000 to the 2016 budget. I propose we add this as a budget line item.
        • Corrigan: Motion to approve.
        • Parker: Second.
        • Tate: Any more discussion? Any objections? None. APPROVED.
      • Match Reimbursement increase: Corrigan had also recommended that we look at increasing match reimbursements. Tate spoke with TRRA (Butch and Scott) and in discussion it was determined that they didn’t feel that match reimbursements needed to be increased at this time. We felt it was better to use funds to recruit and development, rather than increasing reimbursement to the existing referee group.
        • Tate: However, Scott and I did speak about a TRU sponsorship to help referee development. We spoke about a sponsorship that would be specifically dedicated towards promising referees recruitment and development. I feel that this is the right way to spend the money and support TRRA. I propose that we add a $5000 line item to the 2016 budget as a referee development grant.
          • Corrigan: Second
          • Tate: Any discussion?
            • Tomsak: I just want to make sure that I have this right. No increase in match reimbursement but rather a grant for recruitment and development?
            • Tate: Correct, no changes to current TRRA match reimbursements but a grant for referee recruitment and development.
              • No other discussion. APPROVED.
  • D1 match KO times
  • Butch: I’ve worked with Alan and Kirk and we are working on adjusting a few KO times so that we can have all referees micc’d up, etc. Building in 30 minutes for match prep is awesome.
    • Tate: For the spring matches, D2 would KO off at 1pm and D1 is at 3pm. Typically one of the ARs is the referee from the D2 match so this gives everyone more time to prepare for the next match. This may get interesting if we have teams with a 3rd side but we’ll work it out.
  • AR abuse (Butch): Note that we seem to have squashed abuse of the center referee BUT the abuse has shifted to ARs, etc. It’s embarrassing and unacceptable.
  • Meeting closed at 9:19pm