President's Report

Jan/Feb 2005

By Sheri Soderberg Pittman

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to continue serving as USATT president. Congratulations to USATT Secretary Tim Boggan for also being re-elected. Congratulations also to the newly-elected Vice Presidents: Lily Yip and Robert Blackwell. USATT bids farewell to Board members Bob Fox and Robert Mayer and is grateful for their continued willingness to support USATT’s priorities and programs.

I started playing table tennis shortly after Ping Pong Diplomacy. My dream for USATT since then has been for it to evolve into a thriving national governing body that would once again command the public’s attention. As USATT president, I’ve already dedicated upwards of ten thousand hours of my life to learning about and analyzing USATT, USOC and ITTF functions in order to bring USATT closer toward that goal.

Several years ago I decided to dub my president’s report the “association primer series,” meaning that I would primarily treat it as an educational piece. Knowledge is power and I want everyone to share in this knowledge, share in this power, so that together we can achieve great things. In this issue, I wish to present you with an overview of USATT’s relationship with the USOC and the ITTF, as well as preview USATT’s priorities for the 2005-2008 Olympic quadrennium. That way we can all move forward with a shared understanding of the primary factors that will shape and influence USATT over the next four years.

The USATT Board of Directors has already had our first meeting since the election. The November meeting is traditionally spent setting the budget for the following year. Besides approving the 2005 budget, we also set USATT’s primary objectives for this Olympic quad.

USATT’s two most prominent priorities will be creating a state association structure and developing an aggressive marketing plan. The next two priorities focus on taking two of our current properties to a new level: expanding the USATT League and getting our magazine on the newsstand. Priority number 5 is increasing female participation. These priorities are in addition to, and complementary of, all goals and milestones already set in USATT’s Strategic Plan and 2005-2008 High Performance Plan.

At this point, I’m going to digress briefly to discuss one of my own objectives in leading this organization. My idea is to fashion our own unique identity by synthesizing the most important components from our chartering body, the United States Olympic Committee, and our sport’s ultimate governing body, the International Table Tennis Federation. By doing so, we not only develop a viewpoint common to those bodies, but also can achieve greater development opportunities through synergism, direct support and soft money.

I believe that my service as USATT president has coincided with probably the most dynamic phases of both the USOC and the ITTF since either was established.

Over the past five years, the USOC has gone through a complete governance restructuring under the glare of television, newspaper headlines and the United States Congress. It has gone from a 125-member Board to 11 members and had five different presidents. Peter Ueberroth was appointed the USOC president in 2004. There are now only three committees that the Board concerns itself with: governance & nominating, compensation and audit. A fourth committee, Ethics, is composed of non-Board members. The rest is entrusted to staff. The USOC also has advisory councils composed of National Governing Body representatives (the NGB Council) and athlete representatives (the Athletes Advisory Council).

USATT’s point of contact with the USOC is with Chris Vadala. He is one of the USOC’s four Sports Partnership Directors and table tennis is included within his sports portfolio. The USOC’s preferred NGB contact is the executive director. For that reason, USATT conducts our USOC business through Doru Gheorghe. Any member wishing to deal with the USOC should similarly contact Doru. The president is also expected to represent the NGB in various leadership capacities, including, for example, formal NGB representations, such as the ITTF site visit to New York City, which I attended (along with George Brathwaite), in support of the Olympic bid by NYC2012.

The USOC negotiates a Performance Partnership Agreement with each NGB. From the USOC’s perspective, the primary objective of an NGB is to win Olympic medals. Each NGB is required to have an overall general strategic plan and a high performance plan on file with the USOC that spells out what it is doing to meet its performance objectives. To increase its input and influence in each NGB’s performance-planning documents, the USOC led each NGB’s Performance-Based Assessment workshop in 2002.

There have also been a series of dynamic changes within the ITTF over the past five years. From the perspective of presentation: games are now 11 points, the ball is bigger, time-outs have created more suspense and service rules are stricter. The ITTF relocated its headquarters from London to Switzerland (near the IOC) and purchased a castle that also houses a table tennis museum. It established a president’s office in Canada along with a thriving marketing division, TMS. Several strategic and development initiatives have been introduced. USATT’s Aly Salam has contributed heavily to improving the standard of officiating.

The ITTF has placed a high priority on creating more visibility for women. Means to achieve that goal include the creation of a designated Executive Committee seat for a woman, annual Women’s Forums in conjunction with the World Championships since 2003, and several other women’s outreach projects headed up by a Women’s Working Group. I was appointed to serve as a member of the group. The ITTF recently also encouraged national associations to increase their number of female nominees for ITTF committee positions.

In 2002 the ITTF Development Officer, Glenn Tepper, attended a planning meeting between Canada, Bermuda and the United States as we formally designated the North American Table Tennis Union as our continental entity. The first NATTU Continental Agreement was signed in 2003. The Continental Agreement sets forth which developmental activities the continental union will undertake and how much funding the ITTF will provide for those activities.

The ITTF recognizes the president and executive director as the official representatives of their national association. The presidents of national associations, at a minimum, are expected to participate internationally at the Annual General Meeting (the assembly of all member countries). People wishing to communicate with the ITTF, or any of the member national associations, are expected to do so through their own national association. In our case, the point of contact would be me for policy issues and Doru for business issues.

Adham Sharara was first elected as the ITTF president in 1999 and has served continuously as president since then. He immediately set forth four categories of priorities, known as the ITTF’s P4 principles: popularity, participation, profit and planning. The topics are pretty self-explanatory.

During the Olympics in Athens, as the North American Continental/ITTF Vice President, I proposed to the ITTF to take the P4 principles to the national association and continental union level. I suggested that we use the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals as the model that could be adapted for this purpose. (I had initially become familiar with the MDGs through a news magazine I’d come across on an airplane.) In a nutshell, the MDGs set broad goal areas at the top; countries then adapt those goals into setting their own national objectives.

Because our own improvement in performance depends to a large degree on also addressing the popularity of table tennis, increasing the base of participation at all levels (athletes, coaches, officials, volunteers, etc.), which will impact and be impacted by profits and planning, I took the November meeting as an opportunity to fulfill my ITTF proposal at the national level. USATT’s Board had previously approved the association’s performance priorities; those priorities are incorporated into our Performance Partnership Agreement with the USOC. The timing was right for us to begin expanding the breadth of our strategy.

I structured the meeting to follow the same group dynamic workshop structure that the USOC had previously used with us (as outlined in the 2002 November-December President’s Report) to come up with USATT’s quadrennial objectives using the ITTF’s P4 principles.

The Friday night session was dedicated to “State of the Association” reports so that everyone could get a clear understanding of the association’s current status and activities. I discussed my recent representations of USATT and reiterated my primary objectives for the quad. USATT Treasurer Tong Lee and staff presented the financial report. Chris Vadala spoke about USOC-USATT interactions and issues. USATT ED Doru Gheorghe presented the staff report, supplemented by independent contractor Larry Hodges. Finally, USATT General Counsel Dennis Taylor led the Executive Session.

On Saturday morning, I gave a “USATT 101” overview similar to the information contained in this president’s report. Then we split into groups to do the first exercise: target-setting, with the P4 model as a point of reference. A representative from each group summarized the popularity, participation, profit and planning components that each group viewed as vital to USATT’s success.

We then broke into groups again to brainstorm about ways to achieve those goals. Each idea was written on a large post-it. Then the post-its were affixed to the appropriate P4-titled sheet. Everyone got 12 dots that they could use to vote for their most critical priorities, with a maximum of one dot per item. Then, with another color, everyone got to pick his/her top-three priorities. During lunch, I tallied these and created bar charts, one for the most popular choices and another for the most intensely-felt choices. When the meeting resumed, we concluded the exercise by again voting with dots. On the popular choice chart, everyone again got three dots, with a maximum of one dot per item. On the intensely-felt chart, everyone got three dots and could put their dots, including up to all three dots, on any one item. I added together the total votes of the two charts to come up with our top five quadrennial goals.

That is how we came up with our quadrennial goals. If you have appropriate expertise related to these objectives, and would like to assist us, please contact Doru or me. Otherwise, we will announce volunteer and/or professional opportunities once we are ready to pursue the next strategic steps.

Getting back to an overview of the Board meeting, we also addressed some policy matters. The Board adopted a by-law change to require the president to be an American citizen. A similar proposal that would require US citizenship of all Board members was withdrawn as was a proposal dealing with the scope of Board interaction with Board members who are also conducting business with USATT. The Board spent a considerable amount of time grappling with how to handle the conflict of interest issues expected to arise during this quadrennium. For at least the time being, we voted to entrust the Board with monitoring and deciding on questions about Board members’ conflicts of interest.

At Doru’s request, the Board also formally authorized him to explore the possibility of airing the U.S. Nationals. Finally, the Board voted to reward U.S. Olympic and Paralympic medalists with a lifetime USATT membership. I was pleased to be able to make a formal announcement of this in Baltimore and to extend the first one to Tahl Leibovitz.

As we enter 2005, the terms of the three athlete representatives have expired. Thank you Eric Owens, Todd Sweeris and Tawny Banh for your Board service. We welcome their successors: Olympic Athlete Representative Ashu Jain, Male National Athlete’s Representative Khoa Nguyen and Female National Athlete’s Representative Whitney Ping.

I look forward to USATT having a great year in 2005 and I wish everyone a Happy New Year!