To elaborate, this is the letter I recently sent to NFL:
I gather we are once again in red status, and once again we can only qualify one person per category at our district tournament this year.
You well know the history of us and our issues, as I have written to you about them and talked to you about them, as have most of the rest of our committee. We are a small but active district with dedicated coaches working week after week to offer tournaments where students can compete. Charlie Sloat manages our CFL, and I manage the Mid-Hudson League, which together offer our students a regular total package of forensic opportunities, not to mention the invitational tournaments our committee direct and run week after week throughout the northeast. Our coaches are national leaders in the activity: you yourself turn to us often to provide service to the NFL, which we grant gladly and enthusiastically. Our students are among the top in the nation, by any measure. But we are in a bind vis-à-vis the NFL, and there are hard realities that we are unable to overcome. And they are realities that remain true year after year.
As I’m sure you are aware, like many states New York is cutting back on education spending. We will be lucky to keep the programs we have, much less adding new programs; the possibility of recruiting a retired coach ambassador would have no effect on the this situation, even if we had someone available to take on that position. And those occasional new programs that do come along do so on a shoestring. That shoestring of a few hundred dollars gets them into weekly or biweekly CFL or MHL events that we already run; the additional expense of another few hundred dollars simply to be members of the NFL is out of the question. Money is tight, and all the good intentions of the NFL aside—as you’ve outlined them to me to outline to others—simply don’t warrant the expenditure of money that isn’t there. I can’t convince schools to spend money they don’t have for intangible benefits. Additionally, every year national finals are during either our state-mandated regents’ exams or during graduation. It is quite an obstacle for the schools that do attend nationals to make it there; for many of us, going to nationals isn’t even an option.
By hook or by crook you have helped us once overcome the red status, and we appreciate that, but we’re back. And we’re frustrated. By limiting the number of qualifiers we could send to nationals, a school that can indeed field a large entry, like Scarsdale or Iona, faces the fact that their kids are suffering because of their inescapable geography. Because we’re never going to escape those hard realities of our region, both in the number of programs and the timing of nationals even absent the underlying financial issues, we will be in the red either all or most of the time, and as a committee we face the continual frustration of being able to do nothing about it, and—bottom line—the people who will suffer are the kids who work hard and can’t qualify for slots that don’t exist, while half an hour away, in the NYC district, slots remain available that are out of their reach. In other words, not only can most of us not go to nationals because of timing and money, but now we add an extra limitation on those who can go to nationals. We understand that your goal with the district is to increase participation but you are paradoxically shutting us out.
The only reason I do what I do is, honestly, to support my friends and colleagues in the region. By maintaining this district, instead I am hurting them. The district committee has met and agrees unanimously that we no longer wish to fight the endless fight to secure slots, wondering year after year where we stand, in a cycle that is unbreakable. We know the realities of our district. And, I think, Ripon also knows these realities. We, the committee, would hope that, once and for all, we would gain some permanent relief that would not have to be contended year after year, to be allowed to send students to nationals according simply to the number of entries we have in a given category at our district tournament. We request that whatever body is empowered to do so—presumably the executive committee—make a swift determination on this issue. And I apologize for perhaps not going about this in a prescribed, constitutional fashion, but I think we’re just tuckered out. Otherwise, the committee agrees that it would be to the benefit of our students not to continue to maintain this region as a district, and hence, we will resign from the district committee. Again, this may not fit the constitutional picture, but we are willing to accept whatever official consequences might ensue. I don’t mean this as a threat or a challenge, but merely the sad truth. We all work hard week after week to achieve all the goals that the NFL stands for. At the point where our hard work is not achieving those goals—in fact, undermining those goals—we are better off concentrating our efforts elsewhere.
Again, we appreciate what you’ve done for us in the past. I would prefer that we could continue to move forward, but as I say, we’ve really come to the end of our rope.
Thanks.
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As I've said, we've been here before, and I've discussed this before in this blog. And this was Scott Wunn's response:
I sent your petition on behalf of the NY State District to the NFL Board of Directors to be exempted from RED Status.
The Board of Directors has denied this request on a unanimous vote.
The Board and I feel that there are several ways in which the NY State District could have and can take necessary action to avoid the RED status limit of one entry per event.
1. The current schools in the NY State District could have increased new membership and degrees in the NFL by 15% to avoid penalty.
2. The District had 16 paid chapters in the NFL and had the opportunity to maintain that number in 2007-2008.
3. The current schools in the NY State District could have maximized their allotted entry capacities to meet the 700 entry requirement over 3 years.
Finally, the District could have figured out a way to utilize the Give Them a Voice Grants option to avoid RED status.
As was the case in 2006, I and my staff are happy to work with you and your committee to figure out ways that you can work toward meeting the above requirements. However, it appears from your statements in the petition that you just don't feel that any of these requirements can be met.
The Board has decided that these requirements must be upheld in the case of NY State.
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I could go on answering these points forever, but I'm just plain tired of it. I became chair a while back pretty much by accident, because one coach with a lot of voting power didn't really understand the system and thought I could improve things. I didn't. And I couldn't get blood from the turnips in our district and create more schools where they don't exist. At our largest point we were, essentially, blackmailing schools to join up and come to districts so that the interested schools could participate. Those schools no longer have the money or the interest to keep up the facade that we are larger than we are. I have limited time to spend on forensics, and I'd rather spend it where it's fruitful, on the MHL and working in tab rooms and coaching my own team and, shortly, reviving the Modest Novice and things like that. Meeting Ripon's requirements for a district in which I and my team do not meaningfully participate, much less all the work of running the district tournament, takes away from the more profitable use of my time.
I have put the fork in myself, in other words, and determined that I am done.
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