At the request of our members the TRU Board will be releasing their monthly board call minutes and notes. View all of the TRU archived minutes or read on for the most recent notes:
- Roll Call
- Dodge
- Young
- Tomsak
- Tate
- James
- Hiller
- Kurylas
- Yeoman
- Regrets
- Green
- Regrets
- Follow ups
- Forfeits
- 1/19 – Diablos vs Alliance – Diablos played forfeit
- 1/26 – Austin Blacks II vs Dallas Quins II – Quins played forfeit
- 2/2 – San Antonio II vs Galveston II – Galveston played forfeit
- 2/16 – DARC II vs Dallas Diablos – Diablos played forfeit
- Young: No action needed on these, just keeping the board appraised
- WD3 Changes
- Young: We’ve lost two teams and so Nick and I asked the teams what they wanted to do. They opted to do home and away twice with some optional crossover matches. Championships will aim to be a 1v2 playing 15s.
- Tate: How are the WD3 teams feeling in general?
- Young: They are excited and ready to play. In particular OKC and McAllen have good numbers and are very anxious for their matches to begin. The challenge has been balancing teams that have lots of players and those that are still growing. This new format seems to be a good compromise.
- RRRC/TRU Championships (May 4-5)
- Bids
- Austin Blacks (Burr Field)
- Dallas Reds (Lake Highlands)
- West Houston (Aveva Stadium Houston Sports Park)
- Bids
- Forfeits
- Grants
- Jamaya Hawkins (ARPTC Camp)
- Tate: Just so everyone knows, ARPTC is part of our 7s program and is run by Julie McCoy in Little Rock, AR. Jamaya is requesting assistance with attending the camp if selected.
- Dodge: I’m not clear, is she requesting help for after she is selected?
- Tate: My understanding is that this would be a standard grant request ($250) and would help Jamaya travel to the residency trial camp.
- Dodge: Ok, that answers my question. Motion to approve $250 grant for Jamay Hawkins to attend the camp.
- Tomsak: Second.
- Tate: Great, APPROVED.
- Jamaya Hawkins (ARPTC Camp)
- RRRC Election Results
- D1: Jeff Kolberg
- 3-3 tie, Hale elected to join RRRC 7s sub-committee
- D2: Marcus Leming
- Dodge: Of the five seats that were up, only two were contested. That was MD1 and MD2, Marcus Leming won the MD2. There was a tie in the MD1 and under the TOR, as Chair I was empowered to break the tie. I spoke with both nominees and Justin agreed to take a spot on the RRRC 7s subcommittee and Jeff will continue as the MD1 rep. We got the benefit of two really good people when we could have lost one. My intention was not to break the tie but if needed, we would have put it to the entire RRRC committee.
- Tate: Good, I think Justin will be a good addition to the RRRC 7s committee. He’s very passionate about 7s.
- D1: Jeff Kolberg
- RRRC 7s Series
- Dates
- 6/22 – RRRC Qualifier 1 – Bloodfest, Austin, TX
- 6/29 – National Super Qualifier (Men’s) – Locations TBD
- 7/13 – RRRC Qualifier 2 – Location TBD
- 7/27 – RRRC Qualifier 3 – Location TBD
- 8/10 – 8/11 – National Championship tournament – Location TBD
- Tate: We have the dates for the RRRC 7s Series, see above. Dodge, I know I have an email to talk about referees. We need to get together and chat about that. I’ve had discussions with Scott and last fall we agreed on $200 per day (ref day is five games). We wanted to get away from the percentage formulas based on play of qualifying or non-qualifying games.
- Dodge: We’re going to need to discuss it I think. I thought the combined RRRC and TOLA brackets was very successful but we need to figure out the referees. It really helped with having teams at the third event as there were points available for everyone.
- Tate: Scott would greatly prefer to have his invoice paid quickly but that wasn’t the case last year. We didn’t always have someone on the ground keeping track of actual referee assignments, so we would couldn’t figure out the formula until much later.
- Dodge: What if we require a deposit for hosts? To go towards referees?
- Tate: Yes, let’s you and I get together and work on this.
- Dodge: Once we get the RRRC 15s Championship bids we will be requesting RRRC 7s bids. We didn’t want those to overlap and cause confusion. Keuppens and the 7s subcommittee are going to hold an informational call in the next 30 days as there will be some tweaks to formats and rules.
- Dates
- HOF Nominations – Open until Mar 15
- Tate: If you haven’t seen it, we just posted the call for HOF nominations. Would ask all of you to encourage your constituencies to nominate folks. Note that the HOF committee has made a couple of changes, in the past we received lots of nominations that were essentially incomplete and in multiples. The committee is really looking for a narrative and will only consider one nomination per individual. They’ve provided a few example nominations so that everyone can see what is considered a “good” nomination. From there the nominations will be whittled down to a manageable number and final selections will be made from there.
- Tate: The other thing I would point out to everyone is that we’ve tried to clear the 50 years of backlog. We’ve done a pretty good job of that and in the last class we inducted some folks that are younger and/or still active. Now is the time to re-nominate individuals if they weren’t considered the first couple of times as we worked on getting the legacy folks in. We do have a few women in the hall and we could certainly do more. We’d absolutely like our women’s clubs to make some nominations.
- Tate: If you haven’t seen it, we just posted the call for HOF nominations. Would ask all of you to encourage your constituencies to nominate folks. Note that the HOF committee has made a couple of changes, in the past we received lots of nominations that were essentially incomplete and in multiples. The committee is really looking for a narrative and will only consider one nomination per individual. They’ve provided a few example nominations so that everyone can see what is considered a “good” nomination. From there the nominations will be whittled down to a manageable number and final selections will be made from there.
- New Business
- Queries and complaints from MD4 teams – Upper player participation
- Tate: I continue to received complaints around this, so I took some time and dove into the CMS to see some actual data. The first point I would make is that all the complaints are coming from the Northern division. There have been multiple clubs that have been alleged to not be selecting players in the spirit of the game. Second, this would have been the first week that players would have hit the 50% mark if we applied the USA Rugby eligibility rules. Third, there are clearly some misconceptions out there as to what the CMS data means and the history. I’ve had complaints that this guy has been a D3 player for 3-5 years, well prior to last season there was no D4. So any data from three or four years ago doesn’t mean anything. Another thing I noticed is that there seems to be a misconception around the summary data, for multiple side clubs, the summary page counts up both clubs. If you aren’t viewing the actual player data, the matches are all lumped together. If you click on the players name you can see the breakdown of D3 vs D4 matches. Lastly, I’ve determined that most of these teams are selecting players that are D4 guys and are making those selections in the spirit of the game. They may have appearances in D3 or D2 but it’s not heavy. Just because someone used to be a high caliber D2 player, but are now 54…that doesn’t mean they are still that high level player. For the most part, I would say that the teams aren’t abusing the system. There are a few exceptions but again if we’d applied the USAR eligibility rules, they wouldn’t be ineligible. It will be interesting to see what happens as we go down the stretch.
- Tate: If any of your constituents raise it with you, I’d encourage them to review the data a bit closer. When we discuss this in the offseason, we’ll go back and review the data again.
- Dodge: Wendy, would CMS support our MD4/WD3?
- Young: Yes, those divisions are in there.
- Tate: Correct, that’s where I got all the data.
- Tate: I continue to received complaints around this, so I took some time and dove into the CMS to see some actual data. The first point I would make is that all the complaints are coming from the Northern division. There have been multiple clubs that have been alleged to not be selecting players in the spirit of the game. Second, this would have been the first week that players would have hit the 50% mark if we applied the USA Rugby eligibility rules. Third, there are clearly some misconceptions out there as to what the CMS data means and the history. I’ve had complaints that this guy has been a D3 player for 3-5 years, well prior to last season there was no D4. So any data from three or four years ago doesn’t mean anything. Another thing I noticed is that there seems to be a misconception around the summary data, for multiple side clubs, the summary page counts up both clubs. If you aren’t viewing the actual player data, the matches are all lumped together. If you click on the players name you can see the breakdown of D3 vs D4 matches. Lastly, I’ve determined that most of these teams are selecting players that are D4 guys and are making those selections in the spirit of the game. They may have appearances in D3 or D2 but it’s not heavy. Just because someone used to be a high caliber D2 player, but are now 54…that doesn’t mean they are still that high level player. For the most part, I would say that the teams aren’t abusing the system. There are a few exceptions but again if we’d applied the USAR eligibility rules, they wouldn’t be ineligible. It will be interesting to see what happens as we go down the stretch.
- January Referee Camp
- Dodge: Wanted to provide an update that a few of the referees from the January camp helped out with the youth event we had this weekend. Shawn Martin was able to come out and represent TRRA as a referee coach before he had to go to his afternoon match.
- Queries and complaints from MD4 teams – Upper player participation
- Meeting Adjourned (9:02 PM)