justin's Blog
2009 USTA Annual Meeting
If you want to see an office turn into a tornado, come to the USTA the week before our annual meeting. Seriously.The USTA Annual Meeting is one of two large annual events where all of the national volunteers and committees come together for working meetings. This year the event is in Palm Springs, California. It's quite an interesting event - everyone there loves tennis. I always come back inspired and re-energized, not to mention with new ideas and new connections.
This is the first time that the newly formed Tennis On Campus Committee (volunteers) will meet face-to-face. The committee has had one conference call to date, so it'll be a good thing to all be in the same room.
Many of my colleagues' committees are more taxing than mine. We're talking labor and time intensive work going into their committees' meetings. I've seen lots of packet and binder preparation, as well as PowerPoint presentations galore in the office this past week. I'm thankful that everything that we do for the Tennis On Campus program is on our website. Less work leading into these meetings.
In any event, we'll see how the weekend goes. This past week I've gotten back on track with the preparation for the USTA National Campus Championship. Last weekend, the last 5 USTA Campus Championship - Section Events were completed! This means that we can begin to finalize the field for the National Championship, and really start moving forward in certain areas. The Sherry Group is now working on securing press for these last 5 events, and is putting together a piece that we'll be able to use that will recap all 16 of the section championships and lead into the national event.
In addition, I've been reaching out to several college club tennis team leaders that will be attending the USTA National Campus Championship to blog about their experiences leading up to, during, and after the event. While we provide stories and results on the event, these first-hand accounts are really unparalleled (and often more interesting). This is going to be a great new feature to TennisOnCampus.com and the USTA National Campus Championship. I've also been finalizing our SWAG for the event - we've changed up what we're giving away and how we're doing it. Much cooler stuff. Much more benefit for us, the customers (players), and the companies we're working with.
There's still a lot of work left to be done. Even though it's Saturday, I think I'm gonna go and run through the job/task list once more right now and see if I can't make some progress.
Until next time, are you playing TheField?
Justin
Posted: Mar 14, 2009