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02/11/2019 14:51

Subject: Re:SYC

quote

Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:Long read but verifiable facts. SYC parents who are concerned about the repeated re-organizations, lack of communication and embarrassingly unprofessional conduct of SYC Soccer leadership need to educate yourselves on how SYC soccer decisions are made and get active to try and save your club.
Below this message is a link to the SYC Soccer Program Guide. Pages 9-12 describing how the soccer program is managed. In summary, the SYC Board delegates the management of the travel and recreation programs to the "SYC Soccer Committee". This committee is responsible for appointing the Technical Director, Travel Commissioner and REC Commissioner. In addition, the Soccer Committee appoints new members to the Committee by a majority vote.
Current SYC Soccer Committee Membership:
• Members with children playing REC soccer 2 out of 12;
• Members with children playing boys travel 3 out of 12;
• Members with children playing girls travel 7 out of 12;
• The boys travel program has zero representation from the U9-U14 academies.
• The girls 2004 travel team has 4 members on the Committee!!!
• Cesar Torres, voted Co-Chair of the Committee and Travel Commissioner in June 2018, has a daughter playing on the 2004 girls team. In addition, he has a son playing rec soccer and another daughter who plays travel soccer for Arlington. She had played for SYC until this year. That is right, the Commissioner of SYC Travel Soccer moved his own daughter to the Arlington Soccer Association!!!
This is a rumor, but appears to have played out as rumored. The 2004 girls academy did not approve of Lee as the Technical Director and disagreed with coaching changes he made in the 2017-2018 season. The Soccer Committee is now monopolized by the 2004 girls academy and Cesar controls all decisions.
The Soccer Committee and Travel Commissioner have not made an honest effort to appoint members to the Committee that represent the views of its diverse membership. In addition, they made no attempt to survey the full membership or include the REC league directors, travel academy managers or professional soccer coaches in the dialogue as they evaluated the multiple major changes they have made since August 1, 2018. They have ignored explicit, and multiple requests, to have open and honest dialogue with the membership and the coaches they are supposed to represent. In addition, they had received plenty of explicit support for Lee Chang as the technical director and his vision for SYC.
Unfortunately, whether this happened by accident or intentionally, Cesar Torres, Travel Commissioner and Co-chair of the Soccer Committee has been able to assume complete control over all SYC soccer decisions. He proposed, and the Soccer Committee approved, hiring Dotty Talbott as the Executive Director without posting the position publicly. The new Technical Director, Esteban Maldonado, formerly of LMSVC, was hired without a public search. It is unclear who proposed and who approved this decision. If the club needed any of these changes, and I think the role of executive director was needed, it is irresponsible to hire the two most important positions at an soccer club without performing an independent and public search to hire the most capable candidates.

The most disappointing changes at SYC are the complete lack of respect and decency demonstrated by its leadership. Team sports should be teaching kids valuable life lessons such as commitment, reliability, integrity, mutual respect and teamwork. Unfortunately, SYC’s current leadership is not leading by example.

Here is an incomplete list of the unprofessional, sad and embarrassing actions by SYC leadership:

Lee, and 3 other coaches, were fired by e-mail on Saturday January 19, 2019 at approximately 9 pm. Lee had over 12 years of service at SYC, another coach 15+ years with SYC. (I have the e-mail).

Parents with children on teams coached by these individuals were notified, by e-mail, that their coach was no longer employed by SYC, provided the name of the new coach and date and time for a meeting to be introduced to the new coach. All travel players signed a contract committing to SYC for a year and one of the most important factors to this contract is the assumption your coach will not change during the year. SYC does not take their commitment as seriously as they expect their players.

The membership made it crystal clear to Cesar and Dotty, at a town hall meeting on December 3,2018, that coaching changes mid-year were not appropriate and would not be well received. In that meeting they said no changes would be made until they came back to the membership with a plan at the next town hall meeting to be held in January 2019. That town hall meeting never happened.

The full SYC Board of Directors and specifically President of the SYC Board, Chris Spera, made the situation worse by miscalculating the problems with SYC soccer and clearly not understanding the reason SYC is in this situation. The by-laws of the Soccer Committee, as established by the SYC Board, created the environment where a minority of parents are dictating the direction of SYC soccer. This is clearly an issue the full board is responsible for addressing. After many of the parents of kids on teams whose coaches were fired e-mailed him and other board members with their concerns Mr. Spera sent this reply to all teams who had a coaching change:

In recent days the SYC Board of Directors has been included on a number of emails regarding the termination of the contracts of several travel soccer coaches. Please understand that the SYC Board of Directors has nothing to do with the decision to retain or remove a particular coach and will not get involved in reviewing such a decision. That is the purview of the Travel Soccer Commissioner as advised by the Executive Director. SYC offers 13 different sports, with over over 5000 member families and approximately 10,000 annual registrations. The club’s board of directors is responsible for the overall management of the operations of the club, policy decisions regarding what we charge, the sports we offer, and the sound fiscal management of the club as a whole; the board does not make individual sport-specific decisions regarding a particular team’s coach.

In this instance, in the summer and fall of 2018, the board approved several changes in how travel soccer would be administered going forward. That included the appointment of an Executive Director, who was specifically retained to be sure, among other things, that the club was following best practices in how the travel soccer program was being run. These coaching changes are made by the individuals within the sport's administration who are empowered to make such changes. Any action that was taken was taken by the person within travel soccer who is authorized to make the decision and pursuant to the express terms of the contract each coach signed.

There will be further communication from the travel soccer leadership with each team, but the SYC Board of Directors will not get further involved.

On behalf of the Board,

Chris Spera
President, Board of Directors
Springfield/South County Youth Club

Mr. Maldonado was hired while Lee Chang was still employed by SYC.

Keep it classy SYC!
SYC Soccer Program Guide: https://cdn4.sportngin.com/attachments/document/0026/6057/SoccerProgramGuide-MAR062018.pdf?_ga=2.228297949.1985156696.1549495333-994703128.1548174077

I looked at our Program Guide. The first sentence reads, "The Soccer Committee is composed of a minimum of three voting core members, plus three non-voting members: Technical Director, Director of Volunteer Coaches, and the Virginian Tournament Director." So does Dotty, as the Virginian Tournament Director, get around the no vote rule as the Executive Director? There are so many thoughts after looking at this post and our Program Guide that it begins to read like some shady spy novel. Given the voting criteria, the girls' reps alone control the majority to govern all SYC soccer.