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USATF’s 2022 NGB Governance Audit – An Analysis

The USOPC has published USATF’s NGB Governance Audit.

In this post I will take a deep dive into how we got here, where we were deficient, and what this means moving forward…

You can learn more about the USOPC NGB Compliance Standards and get your own copy of our audit here: https://www.usopc.org/ngb-audit

Click “NGB Audit Reports” near the bottom to get your own copy of our audit.

This story begins in 2019.

USATF pays $$ for a Daniels Report to ostensibly look at how to improve our SafeSport efforts.

That report was hijacked for political purposes, remains unpublished to this day.

I wrote about this in more length here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/162889787132224/posts/4506714329416393/

Although USATF never shared the Daniels Report with its membership, which means the inaccurate information could not be exposed, they did share it with the USOPC, who then started making strange demands upon USATF’s membership.

The governance model we had used since the Amateur Sports Act split up AAU was suddenly deemed unacceptable.

This came to a head at the 2020 Annual Meeting, here is an article I wrote prior to that: https://trackandfieldnews.com/opinion-vote-no-against-usatf-losing-its-voice-in-governance/

The USOPC Governance Audit that was being held over our heads that was supposed to take place in 2021 was mysteriously changed to 2022, which allowed it to be held over our heads again.

The same governance issues came to the membership again in 2021, they voted them down even more soundly than before. https://trackandfieldnews.com/opinion-usatf-at-crossroads-again/

I emailed USATF’s Board of Directors after the 2021 Annual Meeting and encouraged them to review the governance audits that had been posted for other NGBs at that point. I expressed concern that we would have deficiencies in other areas of the audit, particularly whistleblower.

I have to stress that throughout this process, our athletes, represented by USATF’s AAC, were continuously being told that it was crucial we do well on the audit, that deficiencies on the audit would put their funding at risk.

Fast forward to May 20, 2022, our Governance Audit is finished. I do not know when the USOPC posted it, I just found it today, but USATF has had this since then.

Let’s break it down…

1. This is tricky because we have always allowed nominations to be made from the floor during athlete elections. But with so many relatively new requirements around SafeSport, background checks, etc, it probably makes sense to move to a model that allows vetting before elections.

2. USATF did publish info about the USOPC Athletes Ombudsman within the past few years, thank you USOPC for getting on them about not pushing that information forward to the athletes. The anti-retaliation statement has now been added.


3 (start with previous image). There is a lot to unpack here… Not shocked that the AAC internal policies are not up to date. Whose responsibility should it be to make sure they are complying with the latest USOPC regs?

4. This is not a big deal, but the board will have to pass emergency legislation to meet that August 15 deadline, unless it gets extended, and they do not currently have a meeting scheduled.

5. Easy enough to fix.

6. LOL @ the multiple codes of ethics.

7. After everything we have been through with conflicts of interest, you would think we would have this stuff nailed down by now…

8. LOL Also, again, I believe these are things the board will have to approve by August 15…

9. This gets pretty in the weeds.

10. I’ve made a number of posts about USATF’s tax returns over the years. Perhaps we are entering the “find out” stage of things.

11. and 12. These are the minor sorts of things you expect to come up in these types of audits.

13. Wait, what?! How do we not have the correct anti-doping language in our bylaws?

14. I don’t know enough about this to say much, other than to note that this sounds like an issue that falls on the National Office staff, not the volunteers.

15. Our grievance process has flaws, but these are fairly minor tweaks that need to be made.

16. Super minor.

17. Will address later in the thread

18. I HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING ABOUT OUR WHISTLEBLOWER POLICY SINCE 2015!!!! I correctly predicted we would have a deficiency here.

I reached out to the board multiple times over the years and begged them to update this.

Ad Hoc – The recommendations in this section are based largely on the Daniels Report. I repeat my previous statements about the Daniels Report being based on inaccurate information, thus leading to recommendations that are not in the best interest of USATF or any NGB.

Nevertheless, there have been extensive negotiations on these issues since December and I am confident a resolution will be reached soon and that we will not have a floor fight over these things at this year’s Annual Meeting.

Deficiencies are normal in these audits. No NGB has had a perfect one yet.

But we had a whole extra year to prepare for this. We had the ability to review other NGBs’ audits to see what issues were frequently coming up. The audit standards were posted.

I personally spent a lot of energy talking with individual board members, emailing the whole board, and posting online to raise awareness about the fact that we had an audit coming up and that we needed to work on things _beyond L&L_ to pass it.

What frustrates me is that I know the focus will continue to be on L&L, and the lack of attention to the rest of this that caused us to have NUMEROUS other deficiencies will be ignored.

L&L has nothing to do with any of the deficiencies in this report outside of the ad hoc.

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USATF Annual Meeting – Hybrid format thoughts?

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?

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2021 USATF Annual Meeting Closing Session Results

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.

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USATF Annual Meeting Closing Session Updates

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.

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The USOPC’s Latest Letter and How We Got Here

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.