What Can You Do?

Hello everyone, this being my first installment I wish I had positive news to communicate, but as most of us all know our boxing team is having much difficulty at the Beijing Olympics. Obviously in the upcoming months this will be thoroughly discussed at all levels as a new plan needs to be devised.  What we are doing is not working and when things aren't working you have to make a change. I think it indicates that not only are there problems at the highest levels of our program, but also at the grass roots LBC levels and corrective action needs to be taken.

What can we do at the LBC level? Quite frankly at this time not much because all of our LBC volunteer chairmen are doing everything they can. We are overloaded with paperwork because on-line enrollment has not been initiated by the national office. This needs to be a primary objective.

I would like all boxing people, particularly LBC chairmen and coaches to send me any new creative programs you have that are helping with the recruitment of boxers or with the management in the organization of your gym. This way, I can put them in the blog for the whole country to share. I think there are tremendous ideas by lots of good boxing people that need to be shared and this sharing will help all of us enrich our programs.

One idea that was recently communicated to me by Olympic Team Manager Joe Smith, was that all the Wal-Mart's from around the country have a volunteer program which if you can convince any Wal-Mart employee to volunteer for your program as a coach or helper in your gym, Wal-Mart will pay your program $10 an hour for this labor. You can go talk to your local Wal-Mart store manager and get him to give you an audience with the employees.  If you can talk a few into helping with your program not only do you have more volunteers, you also get paid.  A double bonus.

Also myself and Dr. Frank Filiberto, chief of the Technical Task Force, just completed the first ever "How to be a Ringside Physician" video. This video is now being edited and will be sent to the national office for distribution throughout the country. It should be a terrific recruitment tool for physicians because one of the first things most physicians, when first asked to help are program, are unsure of what a ringside physician does.  This 30-minute video tells them everything they need to know and focuses particularly on liability exposure. An excellent job was done by Dr. Filiberto in getting this completed and it should be coming your way very soon.

That is all for this week and again if you have any ideas or suggestions to make our program better please send them to me so that I can disseminate them throughout the country via this blog.