As is the case each year at this time, the PVS Board prepares a report for the House of Delegates on how we have done this year relative to our goals and where we are heading in the next year. The House of Delegates Meeting this year is on May 18; it consists of one member from each registered, active club in the association; its major functions are to receive this state of the corporation report, enact major legislation affecting broad areas of the LSC, approve an operating budget for the coming fiscal year (starting Sept 1), and elect members to the Boards of Directors and Review.

The goals for our current season have been relatively modest after the major changes we enacted over the past couple years. Essentially, we wanted to spend the year implementing the changes that were executed last year, review and tidy up our Policy and Procedures Manual and take a look at the organizational structure of the LSC to determine if there were improvements and efficiencies the HOD could enact this year. Of course, unstated was our goal to continue marching aggressively down the Information Superhighway and to iron out any bugs in our move away from PVS sponsored meets to more Club sponsored meets as a way to enhance the revenue base for our member clubs. We believe that we are meeting all our goals and objectives! The House will receive a totally revised version of the PVS Policy and Procedures Manual and it will be presented with some recommended adjustments to the organizational structure that should be transparent to the membership but should improve our overall efficiency. The PVS and Club sponsored meet equation is working, primarily through the aggressive management by Steve Ercolano and Ward Foley and the rest of the Competition and Operations Committees. It has bugs but they are being worked out as we progress through the process; we remain committed to the concept and think it will benefit all members in the seasons to come. Our #1 communications medium is clearly the web page (editor note: see the following article) and we believe we are reaching a greatly increased cross-section of our population now as compared to 4 years ago when we started down this path. In addition to these areas of interest, we have continued our support to other programs, such as the Zone Teams and the new concepts adopted a year ago. This year we have also begun to tackle "good problems" associated with the opening of new and outstanding facilities at the University of Maryland, George Mason University and shortly the Prince Georges Sports and Learning Complex (adjacent to Jack Kent Cooke Stadium); we will be bidding to hold the 2000 Eastern Zone Short Course Championship Meet at PGSLC and are looking to incorporate those other pools into our competition program next season. We have also survived the trauma of replacing our long time Administrative Assistant and have taken advantage of a confluence of events to achieve some cost savings and economies of scale in the administrative areas.

What are the challenges ahead and what is the impact on you? While this Board will be giving the House a cleaned up version of our policies and procedures there are several of those policies that require a serious look toward revision and next year's Board must tackle some thorny, day-to-day policy issues. The new pools in our LSC offer us extraordinary opportunities to exceed our "in-the-water" performance expectations but we are finding there is a cost. New pools are more costly to operate and maintain because of their added features so if we want the advantages they offer our swimmers we must be prepared to pay more for their use. Our budget for next season addresses this opportunity versus increased cost with a partial move toward the new pools but not so completely that we unbalance our budget. We will pay for those advantages by increasing the cost of entry fees across the board by 25 cents per entry. We believe that assessing our competitors is the fairest way to achieve the added revenue to afford use of these new facilities. Next year's Board will be challenged to continue the momentum we have achieved over the past 4 years in enhancing the information available to the membership in whatever medium. The Web Page will remain the focus; one of the casualties is the Family Membership program, since it will not be renewed in its present form. The Board is committed to making information available to the whole community but we are also committed to making hard copy information available on a completely pay-as-you-go basis. One of the actions we took last year was to eliminate the PVS Aquatics Guide and we have decided there really is a community of users for that publication so we intend to make a smaller version of the Guide available to the membership next season. It will contain most of the statistics, names, directions, etc that were available in the past but not the policy information that was in the book before. We plan to sell it for $6 a copy and make it available much earlier in the season. As we did this past year, we will continue to have a dual track set of mailings: the basic package would contain the same information we provided this year, such as meet announcements and other informational data; and the second package, as we did this year, would add all meet results. The price for these 2 tracks would remain the same as this year - $10 for the basic package and an additional $30 for the expanded package of results. The only difference will be that the frequency of distribution will be reduced to 3 times a year based on compiling meet announcements into 3 increments. We believe this approach to providing internet and hard copy information will maximize our exposure while minimizing our costs to the membership as a whole.

Probably the biggest change for next year's Board will be in composition. Not in the past several years have we seen the change in the make up of the Board that we will this coming year. Next year's Board will have new faces in the key positions of General Chairman, Senior Swimming Vice Chairman and Treasurer. Our Nominating Committee has conducted a thorough review of the landscape and has put together a slate of candidates that it will report to the HOD which have all the tools to carry our association into the next century. Placed before the HOD will be a slate that includes: Thirl Crudup, my present Operations Chairman, as the next General Chairman; Jim Garner, a long time pillar on the PVS deck and behind the scenes, as our Senior Swimming Vice Chairman; and John Ertter, who is in the financial business and well known member of our association, as our next Treasurer. We will also be electing 3 members to the Board of Review and selecting Coach and Athlete nominees for election this summer to the Board.

This year we have solidified our understanding of where we are headed and put in place the mechanisms to get there. We also believe that our direction is set. The elements, as always, will need tweaking and constant vigilance but we are putting a team in place that will continue to be good stewards for the membership.