Reinventing USATF
Governance is, let’s face it, boring. Except when it’s not. And it won’t be boring this week in Reno as what ought to be a historic meeting gets underway there Wednesday, the various constituencies of USATF, the U.S. track and field federation, convening to plot the organization’s future.
At issue are a series of proposed changes to USATF bylaws that, as chief executive Doug Logan has spelled out, are aimed at restructuring “how we govern ourselves and how we do business.”
Perhaps the central proposal is one that would slice the USATF board of directors from 32 to 15. Also key: the USATF high-performance plan would be implemented by a USATF staff person accountable to the chief executive. “We simply must become a more efficient and effective organization,” Logan wrote in an Oct. 31 posting on his USATF blog.
He’s dead-on right.
For two reasons.
One, USATF’s history in recent years is far too laden with petty personal politics of the sort that used to bedevil the U.S. Olympic Committee until the USOC reorganized its governance structure in 2003. A lengthy recitation of some USATF issues can be found at www.thefinalsprint.com in a multi-part series keyed by the word “dysfunction.”
Two, governance isn’t boring when the suits leverage business and managerial expertise and experience to bring financial support, administrative oversight and coaching insight to performance on the field of play.
The U.S. track team’s performance in Beijing was, at best, mixed. Yes, there were 23 medals won, seven of them gold. But there were the dropped-baton disasters in both the men’s and women’s 4×100-meter relays. And, moreover, this statistic, which screams out for institutional change: of the 24 spots in field events open to U.S. men at the 2008 Games in Beijing, only four were filled, three by shot-putters and one by pole vaulter Derek Miles. To continue: the 2008 Summer Games marked the first time the U.S. failed to produce a finalist in the high jump, long jump, triple jump or discus.
The governance reforms expected to come out of this Reno meeting are not going to instantly produce longer long jumpers or higher high jumpers. But such reforms, if the USATF stakeholders can grasp the long-term vision thing, hold the potential to do just that — in concert with initiatives such as the focused study already underway by a USATF “high performance audit panel.”
“There is much to be accomplished, and a long road that will follow, here in Reno,” Logan wrote me in an e-mail Tuesday, adding, “Fundamentally, we are in the process of reinventing ourselves as an organization.”