1998 Delegates Meeting
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EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR'S REPORT
This was a year of great change at the USCF.
MEMBERSHIP
In April, membership hit 86,594 – the highest level in the history of the USCF! This indicates that we are providing tournaments, magazines, and other services that are appealing to chess players. We are also placing a major focus on improving customer service. We are seeing some results of this effort, but it is a long-term program rather than a quick-fix approach and so it will take a while to see the full effect. The next step will be the installation of new software and hardware for the membership, sales, and accounting areas. This will improve customer service a great deal, but will likely require many adjustments by us during the installation period.
MAGAZINES
We expanded School Mates, our magazine for scholastic members, to 28 pages, a large increase. I believe that the quality of the magazine has also substantially improved under the direction of Scholastic Director Beatriz Marinello. The upper age limit for scholastic members was reduced from 19 to 14 years old in order to contract the age range of School Mates readership to the 6-14 year old group. While this age range is still broad, it is far easier to write for than the previous 6-19 age range.
Chess Life has seen fewer changes, but it has been adding a bit more color and its tournament reports have been appearing closer in time to the events in question. The hard-working staff at Chess Life also have much better tools to work with following a $90,000 upgrade of their hardware and software. No more will they have to struggle with constant crashes due to insufficient server memory.
WEBSITE
Change at the USCF website (www.uschess.org) has been breath-taking. Terrific ratings pages are available online, first provided with the assistance of Websong Publishing and now by Al Losoff. This has made life much easier for tournament directors as well as providing rating histories and unofficial weekly ratings updates for players. Web news reports have proved popular and the U.S. Championship simulcast with commentary by GM Michael Rohde proved a big draw. This year we also placed our catalog on our website, encouraging online ordering. Online ordering is increasingly popular and I believe it will be a major factor in our book and equipment sales in the coming years. The Internet Chess Club (ICC) is now hosting our site and is doing a fine job. Jade River Design continues to be our mainstay for news content and design and veteran USCF staffer Joan DuBois provides invaluable service in riding herd on the whole process.
INTERNATIONAL
Our over-achieving U.S. team did it again! Though rated fifth going in, the team of Yermolinsky, Benjamin, Gulko, deFirmian, Kaidanov, and Christiansen finished second in the World Team Championship, only � point behind the Russians who needed 4-0 last round victory to pass us. We sent a full team to the Pan American Youth Team tournament for the first time and 5 of 8 of our young stars came away with the gold. We also had two silver medalists and one player tied for third. Congratulations to Alejandro Ramirez, Annie Weiss, Vinay Bhat, Cindy Tsai, Irina Krush, Eugene Perelshteyn, Elina Groberman, and Asuka Nakamura.
SPECIAL EVENTS
This year we decided to share the benefits of the CHESSathon with other parts of the country, moving it from its initial home in New York City. This way, kids in various locations can enjoy the prizes, free chess sets, and contact with top players that they get from the event, rather than serving the same kids in New York every year. Best of all, a variety of kids, many from under-privileged backgrounds, get exposed to the CHESSathon’s message about avoiding negative activities like taking drugs by engaging in positive activities like playing chess.
Newark, New Jersey, was the site of the 1998 CHESSathon (after our original site of San Francisco, California, fell through) and our thanks for a great job go to organizers Denis Barry and the Just One Neighborhood Program of Newark. Vital support was provided by the U.S. Chess Trust, the New Jersey State Chess Federation (thanks to President Herman Drenth), and a host of USCF staffers (led by Helen Kyles and Glenn Petersen) who gave up their Saturday to help the kids.
In 1999 the CHESSathon will probably move farther afield
— to San Antonio, Texas!
PUBLICITY
If we want to increase the popularity of chess (and also attract more sponsorship) we need to revamp our approach to press releases and other forms of publicity. Our first attempt to do this was extremely successful. Hikaru Nakamura’s achieving the Master rating at the younger age ever for a U.S. player (10 years, 79 days), seemed to me a story that had the potential to excite interest in the mainstream national media. We worked with Hikaru’s family to place him on national television including: Good Morning America (ABC), Live with Regis and Kathie Lee (syndicated), Up to the Minute (CBS), and FOX Network News. We also garnered great print media exposure including: The New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, Associated Press (picked up by papers across the country), Gannett (a big chain), People Magazine, and other periodicals too numerous to mention. Further extensive coverage occurred on local television, radio (primarily local but also including the BBC which broadcasts internationally), and soon in books, such as the Guinness Book of Records and the World Kids Almanac 1999.
This publicity represented a lot of free advertising for chess. Thanks to Executive Assistant Barbara DeMaro for winning over the media with her energy and charm. Congratulations to Hikaru Nakamura for his impressive achievement!
OUTREACH
One major focus of our outreach effort, so far, is to form strategic partnerships with respected national organizations. One recent major success in this area is the decision of the National Association of Retired School Teachers to list USCF programs in their resource book as a volunteer opportunity for their 700,000 members in 2,600 chapters. We are one of only about ten organizations picked by them as a national partner to be included in this resource book.
Another success is the decision by the National Association of Secondary School Principals to include the USCF on their list of approved organizations. They had rejected applications by the USCF in previous years. Having the principals behind us will be a big help for local scholastic chess organizing.
We are continuing our work with the Center of Disease Control (CDC) on bringing chess to school districts across the country as an alternative activity for teenagers with the idea of reducing the incidence of teen pregnancy. The partnership with the CDC and most of our other outreach efforts are a direct result of spadework done by Policy Board member Rachel Lieberman.
BOOK AND EQUIPMENT BUSINESS
Sales are up, and so are profits. It is much easier to get through to the USCF because of the new phone system and the hiring of additional sales representatives. The profits from the mail-order business help support many chess activities including the U.S. Championship and the Olympiad team. Members were pleased that the discount on books more than doubled, from 4% to 10%. I am still frustrated that we have too many products on back-order. However, we’re making a major effort to fix this problem and the results should be apparent very soon.
FINANCES
What a difference a year makes! When I became the Executive Director of the USCF, I found an organization that was losing money rapidly (loss of $266,000 for the first half of the fiscal year) and was financing it with dangerous short-term debt ($450,000).
Less obvious, but no less real than the financial debt, was an infrastructure deficit from years of neglect of the basic needs of the organization. The leaky roof, the inadequate server at Chess Life that resulted in wasteful crashes, the phone system that couldn’t release people on hold in the order that their calls were received, the membership and sales computer program that is many generations behind current systems: all needed to be fixed simultaneously. Doing that many disruptive tasks at the same time is not only a tricky operational problem, but it is also a financial drain that occurs at the same time as the debt repayment.
The third financial problem is that, when I arrived, the USCF was coping with its deficit through the attrition of its work force, which had shrunk by almost 20%. Unfortunately, this was causing customer service problems that we are only now working our way out of. So, while paying off the debt and fixing the infrastructure we have also had the expense of hiring back to a staffing level capable of providing good customer service.
By cutting unnecessary costs and by improving the book and equipment business, this financial disaster has been vanquished. Even with hiring to fill the empty customer service slots, replacing the phone system ($60,000) and modernizing Chess Life and publications ($90,000), we have made enough money to pay down $275,000 of the debt, leaving $175,000 to go.
THE FUTURE
We accomplished many of our long-range goals in just one year, but much remains to be done. During fiscal 98-99 I hope to pay off the remainder of the short-term debt while also replacing the inadequate membership, sales, and accounting systems. The 1998 U.S. Championship prize fund will be upgraded to $100,000. In subsequent years, given the increased financial health of the organization, greater resources will be available to further promote chess. The USCF will publicize the overall educational benefits of chess instruction and cooperate with school districts across the nation to encourage them to bring chess to the children of the United States.
Michael Cavallo
U. S. Chess Federation
Executive Director
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