Author: Becca Peter

“Girls and Athletics” was published in 1917, and it included instructions on the pole vault!

Women were not prohibited from pole vaulting until AAU took over women’s track and field in the early 1920s.

You can read this book here: https://archive.org/details/girlsathleticsgi00morg/
or here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56134/56134-h/56134-h.htm

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Sorry to everyone I will miss at USATF Indoors. I don’t have childcare and it didn’t work out for me to attend the meet in-person this time.

I will be posting live updates from this board meeting on Twitter: https://twitter.com/polevaultpower/status/1470532255114305540

I attended the first day of the Annual Meeting remotely, and the rest of the days in-person, so I got to experience both sides of the coin this year. 

I want the hybrid option to be part of the Annual Meeting moving forward. Attending the Annual Meeting is very expensive if no one is funding your trip and you aren’t local, which makes it a big barrier to participation for younger participants and marginalized groups. 

But I also feel strongly that in the future anyone who wants to attend in-person should be allowed to. 

The tech worked OK for really small meetings, but the Owls were a nightmare for large meetings. I spoke with Scott Galbreth about it and suggesting that moving forward we only use microphones instead. That can slow things down a bit, but makes the audio more workable for both those attending remotely and those in-person with hearing impairments. 

Also, Bizzabo is just awful, in my opinion (and everyone I have talked to). I know that the tech to support a large meeting like this is evolving, and I hope that we continue to evaluate new vendors moving forward. 

I would also like to see the National Office invest in some good portable HEPA filters for each room to help reduce the risk of airborne disease at our meetings. We are already transporting tons of signage and such to this event, throwing a dozen or two air purifiers in the truck is not that big of a deal in the big picture. 

What feedback do you have?

Last year the three temporary amendments got between ~53%-62% of the vote, with 2/3 needed to pass.

This year, the same amendments got between ~27%-34% of the votes, with 2/3 needed to pass.

The board heard our message.

Their bylaws committee is going to work with Chris Pasko this week on compromise legislation.

I believe the board will then pass the compromise legislation as emergency legislation in a week or two when they will meet again.

Hopefully they pass things that we all can live with.

Closing session is at 9am Eastern/6am Pacific.

As of late last night, the plan is to have a motion to pull the disputed amendments from the package, a discussion about the merits of the disputed amendments, then a vote to pull, and if that passes, each amendment will be voted up or down.

So delegates need to vote YES to pull the items, then they can vote as they see fit on each of the three amendments, which are TA-1, TA-2 and TA-5 from the Temporary Board Amendments.

On November 8, 2021, Holly Shick, Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer for the USOPC, sent a letter to USATF regarding our upcoming L&L amendments. 

I have the whole letter posted here, but for this post I am going to focus on the part that relates to the Board’s control over the bylaws, and I will repost that portion below.

Before we dive into the letter and the proposed L&L, background about how USATF’s Law and Legislation Committee has functioned is important, because this has been repeatedly misrepresented over the past few years.

How L&L Works

I have been attending L&L meetings since at least 2014, if not earlier. I have personally submitted amendments to the committee. Multiple people on the committee have suggested that I seek a spot on the committee, which I declined because I want to be free to speak out as needed. 

The Law & Legislation Committee oversees USATF’s Governance Handbook, which covers the Bylaws and Operating Regulations of the organization. USATF also has a Rules Committee which oversees the Competition Rules for the organization, and operates in a very similar fashion.

The committee is composed of people who represent the various constituent groups of USATF, including at least 33% athletes, plus people appointed by the President and the Board Chair. Typically, most members have a strong legal background, and the patience to sit through long discussions about whether “shall” or “may” is more appropriate in a sentence. 

The normal process for proposing amendments to the Governance Handbook is that any USATF member can submit proposals in odd years, as long as they get an approval party to recommend their submission. All USATF Board members are approval parties and can submit proposed amendments to the committee without needing any other party’s approval. 

Once the proposals are submitted, the committee begins the work of evaluating them. There is typically a fall meeting where preliminary recommendations are made, then they meet several times during USATF’s annual meeting in December. Input is sought and welcomed from all impacted parties.

The committee generally makes recommendations on each submission, which are brought to the floor at the closing session of the annual meeting for approval. Most years, the delegates at closing session rubber stamp the recommendations of the committee, but the delegates do have the ability to pull an item out of the packet for a floor vote. Each Board member is a delegate, we have had instances where the Board disagreed with the recommendation of the committee, so they pulled an item from the packet and made their case to the delegates directly. 

Outside of the normal process, the Board also has the ability to make emergency changes at any point in the year, which are in place until the next Annual Meeting, where the membership can then vote to make them permanent. The Board can also propose changes any year, which then go through the normal process, not just in odd years.

The Board has used these emergency powers in the past to ensure that USATF complies with rapidly changing laws around SafeSport. Our legislative process has never been a barrier to USATF complying with its legal requirements. 

How We Got Here

The tension between the Board and the L&L Committee began in the summer of 2018. Two of the independent board members had terms that were expiring. The board voted to extend the term of those board members, and allowed those two members to vote on their own terms. Extending their terms beyond the term limits violated USATF’s bylaws, and USATF leadership was notified shortly after the board meeting by an L&L member that a Section 10 complaint would be filed with the USOC if this vote were allowed to stand. USATF then backtracked and said the vote was only advisory. In my opinion, the minutes from that meeting do not accurately reflect what happened. 

Tensions increased in the fall of 2018 when the Board voted to amend the bylaws to allow board members’ terms to be extended beyond the 8-year term limit under certain circumstances. Board Chair Steve Miller held a meeting of thought leaders in the sport in Indianapolis in hopes to gain support for this amendment, as he wanted to extend his own term, but he did not gain support and the board decided to rescind their vote. 

In the summer of 2019, USATF hired former federal prosecutor Deborah Daniels to study USATF’s current policies and practices around SafeSport, in order to effectively and efficiently prevent and respond to the abuse of athletes. USA Gymnastics commissioned a similar report a few years prior. I was one of only two volunteers invited to take part in USATF’s Daniels Report. 

In December 2019, Daniels came to the Board meeting and briefly spoke about her report, which was distributed to the Board. I was surprised and confused to hear her recommendations about the L&L Committee. Her comments indicated that she believed the committee was a barrier to the organization’s ability to provide a safe environment for athletes, and she seemed misinformed about how the committee functions.

For example, Daniels believed it was only possible for legislative changes to be made every two years, but as outlined above, the Board has the ability to make temporary changes to the bylaws at any time, with the ability for those changes to be made permanent at the next Annual Meeting. I do not know who she interviewed about L&L, but they did not ask me about it, nor did they interview any members of the committee. 

Unfortunately, the Daniels Report has never been made public or shared with USATF’s membership. It took me nearly a year to get a copy of it, and I am not authorized to share it. There are many good suggestions for improving athlete safety in the Report, some of which USATF has quietly implemented and some of which have been ignored. I fear that if I even try to discuss topics that have not been made public I will be charged with an ethics violation and my USATF membership suspended.

The Daniels report was shared with the USOPC, it was referenced in a February 2020 letter to USATF as the Krieg Devault Report. The USOPC never had an issue with USATF’s L&L Committee until it read the Daniels Report, which was based on inaccurate information. 

Where We Are Today

USATF has now been engaged in a two year power struggle between the Board and the delegates over who should have the final say in the organizations’ bylaws. If the delegates trusted the Board, this might not be such a difficult proposition, but between the Board approving a controversial contract with Nike that has resulted in an ongoing criminal investigation, allowing USATF to sue its own volunteers, suspend its own President, and the issues previously mentioned, the trust between the two groups is very low. 

The November 2021 letter from Holly Shick of the USOPC to USATF includes the following (highlighting added by me): 

In the first sentence (red), she references a two year timeline, which must have come from the Daniels Report and is wildly inaccurate. As mentioned above, the Board has the power to make necessary changes at any time, the longest they might have to wait for a delegate vote to make their changes permanent is one year (and an emergency meeting of the delegates could be called at any time to make that vote happen earlier).

Her second sentence (purple), suggesting that the Board deal directly with the membership makes even less sense. It would be MORE bureaucracy for the entire Board to have to engage with the membership, and take in all of the comments from them, and this sentence seems to imply that only the Board should ever be able to propose legislation.

If only the Board could propose legislation, either the Board would have to spend a tremendous amount of time dealing with L&L suggestions from the membership and committees, or the membership and committees would never be allowed to suggest legislative changes, both of which would be to the significant detriment of the organization.

Furthermore, her second sentence is also confusing about who would be voting on the amendments, the membership or the Board, because she mentions the L&L Committee submitting competing amendments to the membership, which doesn’t make sense if she is suggesting only the Board should be able to vote on the amendments. 

The third sentence (blue) is not an accurate reflection of our bylaws and not an accurate representation of what has happened in the past few decades of USATF history. If the committee recommends an amendment not be approved by the membership, the Board can pull it from the package for a floor vote, which they have done in the past. 

The final sentence (green) is not relevant at this point, as it pertained to amendments that will not be advancing to the floor. 

Conclusion

It is extremely concerning that the USOPC continues to make recommendations to USATF, under threat of decertification, based on inaccurate information in the Daniels Report, which has never been shared with the membership, leaving us unable to rebut it. 

Last year, the USOPC told us we would receive our NGB audit in 2021 and would likely fail if we did not pass these same temporary amendments. Our NGB audit was moved to 2022, allowing the USOPC to dangle the same threats over our head again this year.

This delay has allowed us to view the audits for 10 other NGBs that were completed in 2021. All 10 had deficiencies. Having a deficiency does not automatically mean the NGB will not be recognized. USATF is almost certainly going to have deficiencies in areas beyond these proposed legislative changes. 

Despite all of the bluster from certain USOPC representatives, there is nothing in the USOPC’s NGB Compliance Standards that clearly states we have to give the board complete control over every aspect of the bylaws. The USOPC bylaws include vague wording about “good governance”, but “good governance” is an ever-moving target with the USOPC. In 2008, the USOC made several governance demands of USATF that we never adopted. In 2018 Rick Adams told USATF that good governance meant our independent board members needed to come off a list provided to us by the USOC, which they later backtracked.   

USATF’s governance model has always relied on a system of checks and balances to keep the organization in line with what is best for our athletes and our sport. We have struggled for the past 12 or so years because people in power have worked to bypass these checks and balances to achieve greater power, but this system worked in 2018 and stopped three board members from trying to extend their terms beyond USATF’s term limits. 

Board members having the ultimate authority over the bylaws that control how they are selected and their terms is simply not good governance in a membership-based NGB such as USATF, no matter how much the USOPC tries to convince us otherwise. 

Perhaps we will lose this fight and never be able to have a meaningful vote again, but tomorrow our vote still counts. We need to vote for what is the best governance for our organization regardless of who the people are in the positions of power. A Board of Directors with unchecked power is not good governance. 

USATF has posted their 2020 tax return (and promptly!)

I have not had a chance to look closely at it, but this is the year COVID hit, so I expect some of the numbers will be impacted.

https://www.flipsnack.com/USATF/2020-form-990-and-related-filings/full-view.html

Here is the recent letter from Holly Shick of the USOPC to USATF. All parties have agreed that it can be made public.

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The Associations Executive Committee approved the following motion last night: 

Motion regarding the Board of Directors proposals:

I move that the AEC reject the BOD amendments and recommend to the Associations delegates to vote against the measures when they come before the membership for vote, and Further, that the Associations chair solicit the cooperation of other Executive Committees of USATF and with other chairs of committees, propose to the Board of Directors, on behalf of the AEC, that the Board work with the membership of USATF toward a compromise on these issues which does not disenfranchise the membership from meaningful involvement in decision making for the betterment of USATF.