Excutive Director Report
June 02, 2008

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USA Water Ski Executive Director Report-Week of June 2, 2008

The U.S. Open, sponsored by MasterCraft, may be falling to the wayside for 2008. For the past two years, the Open has been staged at Downtown Disney in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. Negotiations to continue holding the event at Disney hit a snag in late May, and MasterCraft began the process of exploring options for other locations. Hand-in-hand with MasterCraft's involvement with the Open was its recent re-creation of the MasterCraft Pro Water Ski
Tour. Yesterday (Tuesday, June 3, 2008) we were involved with MasterCraft in a conference call to see if we somehow could salvage this year's Open, knowing that with only three months out it would be a difficult. During the call it was determined that MasterCraft will focus its energies on the Pro Tour and also invest further in pro skiers. Its approach is principally due to the unfortunate fact that there is no known venue with the cache of Downtown Disney that is readily available. USA Water Ski will explore options with the possible combination of the Open with another event, but the tripping point will be the huge financial investment needed to duplicate Open efforts of the past. That effort is at best a remote possibility. Our major focus will be the re-establishment of the Open in 2009.

Several years ago, USA Water Ski in conjunction with an outside insurance carrier carried on a program called Ski Safe. The program was oriented around the provision of high-quality boat property and liability insurance. Part of the arrangement was that each purchaser of the boat insurance would become a supporting member of USA Water Ski. At one time, there were about 15,000 supporting members from this source.

Unfortunately, there were two flaws to this program. One was that the people who became supporting members did not know why they had become members of USA Water Ski and generally did not care (and, we did not work toward recruiting them on a full-time basis through interpreting our programs and asking them to re-up). The second was that USA Water Ski did not own the program. In the end, there was a falling out between USA Water Ski and the Ski Safe broker. The broker took the Ski Safe name, operated without USA Water Ski and continues today. USA Water Ski created another program with Global Marine Insurance Agency and called it H2O Ski Plus Insurance. It is a better program, but the unfortunate reality in the insurance marketplace is that it is very difficult to convince customers to move from one policy to another once a relationship is established.

Fast forward to the present. Later today we will announce a new USA Water Ski Club Insurance Program that will provide General Liability and Participant Accident coverage for club activities and exposures that fall outside of the insurance coverage provided by USA Water Ski as part of sanctioning. USA Water Ski will own this new program. In the event there is a falling out with the broker and/or carrier partners, USA Water Ski will carry on the program with the same name, but different partners. We do not anticipate that happening as our new partners are highly thought of within the sports and insurance industries. The broker is Entertainment and Sports Insurance Experts (ESIX) and the carriers are Mount Hawley Insurance Company and Chubb. Later today, and separate from this report, a press release will be distributed explaining this very important offering from USA Water Ski.

Bobbie Razor, USA Water Ski's director of accounting, remains in a rehabilitation facility. She is expected to be in the facility for the next three weeks. I visited her last weekend. She is in good spirits and anxious to get back to work. She now has a laptop and is working virtually from her site. Bobbie asked me to thank everyone that has contacted her thus far. She does have a new direct phone line and the number is (863) 294-8908.

USA Water Ski has a cadre of skilled software code writers who continually have put into place programs to benefit the membership of this organization. Mark Crone, Jim Meis and Dave Clark are the principals in this effort, and they have provided these services pro bono for decades. Below is a letter of appreciation from the Ski Watch Ski Club referring to the on-line registration program introduced this year:

Hey Mark Crone and USA Water Ski,

Great Job on the Online Registration System! We at Ski Watch have finished our first tournament using the new Online Tournament Registration system. Out of 29 initial entries, we had 19 people use the online system.

From the LOC/Registrar perspective, the online registration system proved to be a real time saver. At the start of the tournament day, for the people who had registered online, all work was done.

All records of payment and waiver verification were paperlessly stored online at Pay Pal and USA Water Ski. We had two scratches. Both were easily refunded, paperlessly, through Pay Pal. We wanted to give credit to one entrant for promo boat gas. He was easily "partially" refunded, paperlessly, through Pay Pal.

The ten people that did not use the system had to be entered manually into the system. This turned out to be pretty painless and actually saved a lot of time because it automatically verifies membership in USA Water Ski and adds
them to the registration list.

The registration and seeding products that are available to print out were great! I filtered out all FL entries to collect FL federation membership, used the seeding filter to set up the running order, and printed out the registration status to tie up the loose ends of the manual entries on tournament day. Total bill for using the system for this tournament: USA Water Ski set up fee $15 + 3.5% Pay Pal fees of $26.25 = $45.21 total. As the registrar, tournament director, judge, and skier, I only had about 3 minutes of work to do as the registrar when I showed up to the tournament. It was definitely worth the $45 to me!

I had mostly positive feedback from the skiers that used the system. It seems that if you had high speed Internet, it was totally painless. Also, skiers that were already familiar with the USA Water Ski site and Pay Pal had no
problems. The most common problem: Not following the redirection back to the USA Water Ski site (after making the credit card payment at Pay Pal) to finish the registration process. Suggestion to first time users: Read the instructions/fine print!

Again, thanks for your hard work! We like Online Registration!

– Jeff Harber and Ski Watch Ski Club

For 2008, we created new online capabilities through the use of a vender for signing on as a member or renewing. We have run into some difficulties that are similar to other sports organizations that are causing members who want to renew to go into the new member area as the renewal portion requires a password (and, most people do not recall their passwords). Dave Clark and the Membership Department are working toward a remedy that can be introduced in the near term (yet this week). For people not familiar with online setups, our process is currently extremely frustrating. Our attempt is to simplify it and still have proper security in place.

Wow, it is 93 degrees in Florida now on a regular basis and beginning to feel steamy.

Have a great weekend.

Steven M. Locke
Executive Director
slocke@usawaterski.org
Ext. 134
Member United

Steve Locke
Executive Director
USA Water Ski