AYSO - Lake Tahoe

Hello everyone, This email is in reguards to trying to establish a reward system for parent volunteer time to help boost volunteerism throughout AYSO and to bring our region in line with Carson City. As discussed at February's board meeting I was going to try to put together some ideas for rewarding volunteer hours with being able to play in the area tournament, this tournament is in addition to our end of season tournament and allstars. The stumbling block to this format will be in fairly and accurately keeping track of the volunteer hours. We would need to create another board position with many assistants to accurately keep track of the hours. I think everyone will have plenty on their respective plates without the additional burden! So I think a very streamlined version will be nessasary. While talking to Harold Singer after the last board meeting he mentioned the need for referees and possibly rewarding ref hours double that of other volunteer hours. I agree with Harold and see the ref shortage as one of our region's top concerns. With that in mind I propose for our first year(we can expand later) we reward ref hours only and keep track of the hours with the game cards. Game cards signed by the coaches and the refs - easily verified. If someone wanted to cheat and stuff the box it would be easy to recognize when 200 game cards showed up and only 100 games were played. The challenge with this format will be collecting the game cards and not letting them sit in the field boxes. If we keep with one of the ideas mentioned at the last board meeting of increasing the attendance of board members at the fields it could be a board member who collects the game cards for that day. Or are we eligable for bulk rate postage? Print new game cards with pre paid postage. You don't mail it in you don't get credit. Secondly, so your team provides the most referee hours what do you get? Once again Harold had a good workable Idea... The referee hours are added up for each team and applied to the standings of our end of the season tournament, which means if the first place team has less referee hours volunteered then the second place team, the second place team gets to advace to the area tournament, so on and so forth. I would personally lean towards a straight up volunteer based system. If your team provides the most referee hours they go to the area tournament. Our region rewards the best team play at the season ending tournament, our area rewards the best individual play with an allstar tournament. We have select soccer in the spring for the more talented and determined. Why not use volunteerism as the paradigm for the area tournament? I emailed Eric Ingbar twice and did not recieve a reply so I did not get any input from Carson City. I think we will need input from the entire area to make this work best. If one region sends a team based on volunteer hours and another sends a team for it's first place finish in league or tournament this has the potential to be very unbalanced. This needs to be worked out at an area meeting. I will not be able to attend the 03/07/06 board meeting so please discuss the preposed ideas and feel free to add or delete, the more input from the board the better! I'll read about it in the minutes... Or if anyone would like to discuss the matter please feel free to blog this and start some communication about this. Thanks, Jeff Babbitt