Trevor Kronemann, Director of Junior Tennis SCTA reached out to me last night over e-mail. I give the man a lot of credit for doing that. I can tell you that if someone was as displeased with the job I was doing, and was as vocal about it as I am being -- I'm not sure I'd be able to be as polite and calm about the entire situation as he is. He has only been at the job since November -- I didn't know that. That's pretty new to the job; I wonder if he anticipated how difficult it would be and if he has any regrets :-). He offered to meet with me in person this weekend and I agreed. I hope we do meet face to face and we can have a productive dialog.
If I were in his position, the one thing I would do, is I would be quick to admit mistakes. It's okay to make mistakes; everyone makes them. But you should be quick to own up to them, and you should come completely clean (this is one of the best lessons I learned from my father at an early age). Trevor told me last night that he had accidentally selected the "USTA ratings list" as the rank list type when selecting Auto Seed, yet a friend of mine (who has access to the TDM software) said no such rank list type exists. So something isn't right here. I looked at my kids various rankings, and I couldn't find that ranking list type (amongst the 82 that were there -- why are there so many ranking list types?? Seriously!).
So what's going on here? Either he mis-typed the name of the rank list type in his e-mail to me, sees different ranking list types with his login to the TDM, or made the rankings manually and is reluctant to admit it now. I don't know. And I am not accusing anybody of anything - I just want a valid explanation for what happened. Because again, this is not about the draws being wrong, this is about having full accountability for how they were drawn up wrong in the first place, and why there was so much dismissive resistance to changing them. It's not as if "hey, we screwed up in making the draws, we fixed the draws, everything is okay now." That would have been the case if that was the first response. Instead - we have this mess.
Phil,
ReplyDeleteI have asked Bruce Hunt to post a response on your site or Parenting Aces.
Here is the text of what i sent:
Bruce,
We have a big issue with integrity in the junior competition program.
Please read the following:
http://sctacomplaint.blogspot.com/
http://parentingaces.com/is-something-rotten-in-the-state-of-california/
The second link was emailed out to 100,000 tennis parents throughout the country by Parenting Aces.
Many if not all of the tennis parents in the SCTA are aware of this issue and are awaiting an answer as to what happened and what you are going to to make sure this never happens again.
Your lack of of a response and action is speaking volumes to all of us.
Please post your response directly on either or both of these sites.