The July 31st election deadline is approaching fast. Vote Now!!!

The PDGA Board formed the Nominating Committee at the 2011 Spring Summit. The overall goal of the committee is to enhance the quality of the election pool for the Board, ultimately improving the effectiveness of the elected Board.

The principal motivation for this new effort is the realization that the responsibilities of PDGA Board members have become significantly more demanding as the organization and the sport has grown larger and more complex. Additionally, there is the concern that there are qualified candidates within our membership who might need additional motivation and information in order to consider running for a Board position.

The charge to the committee was two-fold, both to provide outreach to promising new candidates for the Board and to identify the skills, training and other abilities that contributed to productive service on the Board.

2012 Board of Directors Candidates

• Tommy Bison, Jr., #52303 - Louisiana
• John Dorn, #13295 - Wisconsin
• Ed Gonzales, #7297 - Kansas
• Jack Hicks, #28773 - Florida
• Avery Jenkins, #7495 - California
• Jack Lowe, #15316 - Missouri
• Tom Lowry, #2446 - Oklahoma
• Karolyn O'Cull, #16994 – Michigan (Germany)
• Rick Rothstein, #2458 - Missouri
• Michael Solt, # 32429 - Pennsylvania
• Stephen Straight, #25402 - Colorado
• Logan Turner, #29345 - California

Click here for Candidate Biographies and Statements.

Three at-large Board member positions will be elected this year and the three candidates receiving the most votes will serve three year terms from September 1, 2012 to August 31, 2015. 

Because of the large number of candidates, it’s a daunting task to fairly evaluate their potential for effective service on the Board. It’s important to note that the work of the Board members has become considerably more demanding as the PDGA and the sport have become larger and more complex. In order to make the assessments as fair as possible, we wanted to create a set of metrics that could be applied equally to each candidate. Realizing that this would be a very inexact science, the goal was to identify some of the key attributes that we felt were deemed important for a PDGA Board member to possess.

PDGA Board of Directors Key Attributes

Training and/or Experience in:

• Competitive Disc Golf
• Disc Golf Organization
• Finance
• Sales and Marketing
• Tech Management and Development
• Human Resources Management
• Journalism
• Event Production

Skilled in:

• Oral Communication
• Written Communication
• Promotion
• Listening to Others

Intangibles:

• Enthusiasm for the Task
• Time Availability
• Collaborative
• Creative Innovator
• Vision
• Flexible/Adaptable
• Respected

We suggest that you carefully read the candidate bios and statements and make your own assessment of how they match up with these attributes. 

Of course, when you pull out separate factors like this, the parts of the whole do not always add up as we might expect. In order to balance that concern, the committee also suggests a second evaluation to provide a more practical assessment of each candidate’s potential for useful service on the Board. To do that, we suggest that you imagine that you have your choice of all 12 candidates for a number of typical PDGA Board task assignments. See how each of the candidates matches up with these tasks. If you find yourself consistently picking out a candidate for numerous assignments, that’s a significant indicator. If, on the other hand, you can’t find a fit for a candidate, then that may be a sign that there would be the same situation on the Board. The goal is to achieve a more typical and real-world assessment of each candidate’s abilities. The suggested tasks to consider include:

• Moderating a member forum at Worlds
• Overseeing a redesign of pdga.com
• Selecting an editor for DiscGolfer magazine
• Liaison to the Rules Committee
• Overseeing PDGA actions in a lawsuit
• Coordinating the revamp of the PDGA logo 
• Liaison with a youth development program
• Reviewing the PDGA's annual auditor's report
• Liaison to the Tech Standards Committee
• Providing IDGC staffing oversight
• Selection of a PDGA Executive Director
• Liaison to the Course Design Group
• Redesigning the national tour

The Bottom Line

As in any election, there are many important factors on which you simply won’t have enough information. In the case of candidates that you may know personally, they may gain advantage or be held unfairly accountable for things that you know about their past actions. Candidates who you don’t know are impossible to assess on some of the key factors and also may gain advantage by presenting biographical information that is not reflective of their true abilities. Candidates who have long, successful experience in PDGA work have a clear advantage in our evaluation process. If you have a job that needs to be done, it’s natural to pick the proven veteran over the unknown. However, we also know that it’s essential to have fresh perspectives on a successful Board. It’s hard to give that untapped potential its fair weight in this process.  In short, it’s very difficult to predict how effective any particular candidate may actually be as a Board member.

Board candidates were invited and encouraged to create a video introduction this year, and to include a link to it in their bio. Several have taken advantage of this opportunity and additional links to other candidate statements may be posted, prior to the election, with the candidate materials at pdga.com.

For now, we hope that you’ll find that these assessment tools help you focus on the kind of Board member that you want to move the PDGA forward to the future that you imagine.

Please Vote!

All members were emailed ballots in early July, please take a few minutes of your time to complete and submit it. In doing so not only are you fulfilling one of your basic rights and responsibilities as a PDGA member, but you are also demonstrating that the work performed by these core volunteers is important and worthwhile, both for you personally, and for the PDGA and disc golf as a whole.