The FLRC Board of Directors will have its monthly meeting tonight, Wednesday, May 8, at 6:15 PM via Zoom. All our meetings are open to the public, so if you’d like to attend, email board-meeting@fingerlakesrunners.org to receive the Zoom connection details via auto-reply (and let me know if you don’t get the auto-reply). The link is the same if you’ve previously requested it.
Our board meetings revolve around club and committee activity updates, including a report on the club’s financial position and quick coverage of past and upcoming races. This month, our main discussions will revolve around these three draft policies:
I open each board meeting with a quick acknowledgment of those who have gone above and beyond in volunteering for the club in the past month. To give credit where it’s due in public, please join me in thanking the following people:
Kate McCormick for coaching the Tuesday night kid workouts at Barton Hall from November through April. She did a stellar job of wrangling up to eight young children into running games and other exercises.
Kris Haines-Sharp and Will Fox for being the driving forces behind the Run For Your Life project and its Friday Unite group runs.
Charlie Fay for drafting the draft Code of Conduct and Safe Sport Compliance Policy.
Adam,
Not an active club member, but a parent of one of the teens that ran with you guys over the winter at Barton. Just wanted to send along a thanks for the Safe Sport policy. And thank you and the rest of the club for making the indoor training sessions so welcoming to the middle schoolers that showed up every week. Since there is no indoor track program available that age group at Ithaca High School, it was very beneficial to my 7th grader to have a dedicated time and space to run every week. Even on the nights she didn’t really want to leave the house to go, she always came home in a great mood and was thankful for the group and opportunity. On the couple of nights that I tagged along to walk the track while she ran, I was impressed at what an inclusive group there was and how folks were glad to welcome the middle schoolers into the workout.
Thanks for the kind words, Laura! I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t realize that the middle schoolers weren’t reading the workout announcements here on the forum, and parents weren’t necessarily passing them along, so the middle schoolers didn’t have as much advance notice as the adults.
For next year, I’m thinking about how we can tweak things to make the middle schoolers’ experience even better.
The Safe Sport Compliance Policy will help us make sure we’re thinking about such issues when working with minors. We’ve never had a problem, and I want to make sure it stays that way.
To be honest, I’m not sure the kids really cared that they didn’t know the workout ahead of time. I asked Simka about it once “did you know what you were going to be doing for a workout before you got there?” and she said she didn’t really care what the workout was going to be, she was just glad to meet up with friends for a run! Talking with some of the other kids who we carpool with, they didn’t really seem to care either - not knowing the workout ahead of time made no difference to them!
Good to know. It’s not so much that I want them to know about the workout in advance, it’s that I might talk with them a little more directly to make sure they understand the workout and what it’s trying to achieve. I do discuss this generally with the group before we start, but I’ve usually assumed that people have a little more background than a middle schooler might.
And of course, for middle schoolers, the most important thing is that they’re having fun while running.