2019 All Hands Meeting Minutes

Feb. 23, 2019 by Kara "Red Hawk" Baden

Lawrence Trail Hawk All Hands Meeting

President Cara Combs called the meeting to order at 6:55 p.m.

Financial Update-Josh McVey, Treasurer

As a club, we are doing phonomial. Events like the RRCA and CPR training made us money this past year. We bought new equipment this past year. We bought more tents, tables, water jugs, coolers and storage shelves. This year we have hired SCCC to file 990EZ. All of our races were profitable.

Race revenue: $76,231.26 Donations: $5,375 In honor of Peggy Chick Hawk Beecher we donated $3,325 to United Way. 2019 Expected non-race expenses is $9,322. This is our operating budget right now. Non-race expenses for 2018: $6,688.88

Membership Report- Caroline

Our current membership: 225 members counting January and February of this year. Members using the family membership need to email Caroline so she knows who is everyone in each family.

Supply Update-Cara

We have moved up to a new storage unit that is bigger. We have been keeping it clean and up to date. We have made it easily accessible. The tents and the carts were the big expenses for equipment for 2018.

Successes from the 2018 races: Cara

Timer Guys-Helpful timing company for club Spider wranglers-Important for Skyline Shuffle Catered meals-Helpful for the weekend of the Hawk Facebook Ads for races help bring new signups

Lessons learned from races: Cara

Safety is important for races. We need to create guidelines for different distances for the races to focus on safety. Keeping track of which distance everyone is running and knowing where runners are at all times needs to be a priority. We are working with Ultrasignup on reports to make it easier on race directors. Ultrasignup has had a hard time in the past of tracking what everyone orders when they sign up for our races. We have been working on it so reports are more accurate and it is easier for race directors to know exactly what people have signed up for. If a race director is having issues let us know so we can get it worked on. Date management-Making sure that we don’t overlap on other events and make smart choices as we move forward. We don’t want to have conflicts with other dates in the Kansas City area. Naming ceremony and making sure that is more efficient way to naming. We are going to be doing it more on the runs throughout the year and just not on fat asses. Volunteers-Adding more skillful volunteers and multiple waves of volunteers for larger races. We will also work on communication for volunteers. Staggered start around larger races. We are going to continue that as our races grow.

Discuss Strategic Plans: Josh

Now that our club has matured and we have grown, we are asking races to have a 15% return on each race. We need to rely on races to help cover our $9,000 cost of the club. In the past we have not given any guidelines for race directors. We are trying to raise money so we have new opportunities in the future to give back.

Communication throughout the club: Cara

We are all volunteers and we trying to do our best. We are trying to find ways to communicate better with the club. We plan to email more and make sure that our communication is strong throughout the website.

Advertising for the club is to help get our information out to the running community and to continue replenishing membership. Not to grow substantially. We plan to give $180 to support trail running podcasts through Patreon.

Volunteer Shirts: Lisa Ball, vice president

We wanted to find a way to recognize and appreciate our volunteers. We created a universal t-shirt that we will pay for from non-race funds. This will help make it easy to recognize volunteers. We have the t-shirt created and have them ready for Pi Day. It’s easier for us to have one shirt that everyone can use multiple times.

Volunteer committee: Cara

We are looking for a group of 3-4 people to start a volunteer committee. They need to have some volunteer experience with a great idea of what needs to happen at an aid station. The committee will be responsible for organizing volunteers to help when needed. We are going to start the committee as soon as possible. This committee will also help us figure out how to recognize volunteers.

Recognition of Race Directors and Run Leaders: Josh

We are recognizing our run leaders and race directors on odd number years. All of our race directors (excluding board members) are getting reimbursed up to $200 for a training or a race that they would like to do. They are going to learn from that race or training and share that with us. We want to thank our race directors for all their hard work on making our races amazing and successful.

Run leaders: All our run leaders (excluding board members) are allowed a free race entry into any Trail Hawk race. It doesn’t count against the races and excludes Sander’s Saunter. Thank you run leaders for all your hard work.

Golden Hawk Presentation:

We sworn in our Golden Hawks with the help of Cara and Gary Henry. 23 total inductees.

Election of officers: Cara

Members of the Lawrence Trail Hawks elected the current board for 2019. Cara Combs-President, Lisa Ball-vice president, Josh McVey-treasurer, Kara Protasio-Secretary

Other Business:

Lost and found a pair black and blue sunglasses from the half ass.

Gary-Benita Jones is also been co-director of the snake and the snake has an opening of co-director. Tesa Green has also stepped back. See Gary if you want to help.

Caroline-Pi Day volunteer is going up on UltraSignup.

Cara-Adopt of Highway-We are going to try and get that going. We still need to do training to get it done. Lisa and Lori Moriarty are going to lead the way on that. We plan on doing that during 2019.

Flyers-We will create a new flyer for our schedule. We will look into updating our club trifolds.

We have requests for volunteers. Shamrock Shuffle, Prairie Spirit Trail-March 30, Heartland 50- April 27, Heartland 100-October 12.

Sherrie Klover -Plenty of positions for helping with the Hawk Hundred. This year the Hawk is the RRCA state championship race. The race is getting so big that it needs more people to step up and help.

Cara adjourned the meeting at 7:56 p.m.

2015 HAWK 100, 50, 26.2 photo by Mile 90 Photography

Lawrence Trail Hawks Birthday Run 2018