Minutes of the Capital District Squash Racquets Association
Annual Meeting 10/4/2007
The meeting was called to order by President Ralph Bandel at 7:10 PM. Approximately 18 members were present.
Treasurer’s report: We have a fund balance of $6,500+.
We reviewed the US men’s team selection event held with an amateur tournament at Siena earlier this year and agreed that is was a great success. Special thanks to Jack Graham for his extraordinary efforts at fund raising and publicity to make this event a success. We are planning a similar women’s US team selection event March 7-9, 2008. Because of the later date and proximity to the Doolittle Capital District Championships, we will look to hold a regional amateur tournament as a stand-alone event a little earlier, probably in February, rather than holding an amateur event with the pro tournament.
Pete Avitable is planning to run a handicap tournament similar to the successful handicap tournament held last fall on a weekend in late October or early November at SAC. Watch your e-mail for more details.
The National team championships are being held at Yale on December 7-9, 2007 with teams at 6.5, 5.5 and 4.5 levels. We don’t feel we have quite enough players at the 6.5 levels to field a team, but if you are interested in playing on a 5.5 or 4.5 level team, please contact Pete Avitable or Ralph Bandel.
A USSRA meeting of local SRA’s was held in NYC in conjunction with the US Open the weekend of Sept. 29-30 in NYC (site of the USSRA’s new offices). Pete Avitable attended as the CDSRA’s representative and reported that the USSRA is very interested in helping the regional squash associations like ours with junior development, running leagues, and possibly helping with fund raising for our selection event. Also, USSRA has decided to allow local ladder matches to count towards player ratings and tournament exposures (for purposes of eligibility to participate in National events) and, toward this end, they are expanding Railstation to allow local SRA members to enter their local ladder matches. This will save Ralph a good deal of work on setting up the individual league matches (which are really, in effect, CDSRA ladder matches) as it can (hopefully) all be done automatically on Railstation. We will be in touch with USSRA on this and keep you posted.
League play will start soon. We plan on again having both individual match play and teams. Rather than drafting teams as we did last year, we are going to try to set up at least two (possibly three) Steuben Club and Siena based teams. The general idea is that the teams will be mixed with A-C players. There will be separate ladders for each of the teams within each club. The ladders will be organized within each club. Team matches will be played in a separate week or weeks following the individual league sessions as opposed to being played simultaneously with the individual league matches as was done last year.
There was no further business. The meeting was adjourned at 8:15PM.
Respectfully submitted,
James A. Slavin
Secretary