Wednesday, November 13th - 4 hours

Tonight after my usual duties and activities, I went to a board meeting. What an insightful experience. The biggest topic of the evening was the Town Hall event next week. One thing I've noticed about this club is the lack of sufficient communication. When I coached my own teams, we would get last minute updates about coaching meetings, field reassignments, and other expectations within the club which can obviously become frustrating. This seems to be the same situation in regards to the Town Hall event. The directors made one announcement a while back that was vague and if you are a non-soccer minded person, probably didn't catch your attention very much. I was on the frustrating side of receiving their last minute information relays as a coach for a couple years thinking "Why do they wait until the last minute!? Not everyone's lives revolve around soccer!" Now that I've been hearing input from their side more, it's interesting to hear how they genuinely don't see how frustrating it is receiving messages last minute. They think regardless of timing, they're at least keeping people in the loop. I'm hoping that I can approach this at some point as a way to improve from internship feedback rather than coming off in an aggressive way about how frustrating it is. They are usually pretty open to constructive criticism, so I think it will go well.

Another thing I learned at the meeting was how important it is to control the meeting as the meeting facilitator. For a solid twenty minutes, it turned into a volume match with mainly two women thinking that talking louder meant what they had to say was more important. As the facilitator, it's important to keep the meeting focused, organized, and on track.

A final discussion that came up at the meeting was a parent hoping to understand why the younger teams are divided into two equal teams rather than A and B teams like other clubs do at their age and our club does at the older ages. The club thinking on this is to motivated the players that might be behind to be as good as the more skilled players. A few parents on the board were able to attest to this, one even seeing the difference between this method and the other method where one of his sons was not making as much progress because he was consistently on B teams when he was younger rather than splitting age groups evenly. This sparked the idea to have a parent meeting, likely before the spring season starts, to describe this to parents.