Newsletter, July 2022

Highlights

Board of Directors

Vision

Communications

Reorganizing IFPA (Bylaws)

Changes in Freestyle Events

Website updates

Upcoming Elections and Vote on the Bylaws

Highlights

IFPA is so excited that the World Footbag Championships will be happening again this year, after a 2-year absence. Both the European Championships and Worlds will be in Poland at the end of July, 2022. Thank you to the organizers and everyone who is helping, Your effort and dedication to footbag is appreciated. The IFPA Board of Directors would like to welcome the players back to competition and invite everyone in this community to give input on how we can grow this sport and increase participation.

Since the summer of 2020, there have been a lot of changes at IFPA. Arthur Ledain was elected as the Executive Director in August, 2020. Arthur shared his vision and ideas to help grow the sport's popularity a video (VLOG3) which was published in July of 2020 before the election. This videos and more are hosted and shared with the footbag community on IFPA's YouTube Channel.

As the Executive Director of IFPA, Arthur Ledain has a two-part vision. Arthur has been dedicating countless hours for the past 2 years building a team and working toward that vision. On the practical side, the goal is to restructure the IFPA to be more efficient. On the strategic side, the vision is an approach of how to grow the sport. Arthur and his team have a 3-fold approach to both prongs: communication, responsibility, and transparency.

To be more efficient, we propose a project-based structure the IFPA board with more meaningful positions. With a project based approach, tasks and projects can be proposed and approved, run by a project manager and with a deadline. To facilitate this more fluid and dynamic approach, we want to reduce the number of elected positions and the term lengths. These changes require updates to the IFPA bylaws, which requires by the membership . More details about the bylaws changes are explained in the section below.

The vision to grow the sport ultimately is the job of people in the local communities. This is the best way to recruit new players. This is not the task of IFPA, except to help inspire and help. The best way IFPA can help with this it to get more exposure for the sport during the week of Worlds. IFPA would like to reduce the time that the World Championships is inside a gym to free up time to promote the sport with the worlds best players in the host city. We need to expose footbag to the public, especially the younger age groups. We also want to restructure some of the events to make them more appealing and accessible to a wider circle of the public.

Here is a summary of IFPA's recent accomplishments.

European Footbag Championships (Jaworzno, Poland, July 22-24, 2022)
2022 World Footbag Championships (Krakow, Poland, July 27-31, 2022), link https://worlds2022.footbag.pl/
Communications: Newsletter, January 2021 ; Newsletter, January 2022 - announcing the dates and locations for Euros and Worlds; Updates regarding the war in Ukraine; April 2022 Update on Worlds in Poland
Online Worlds 2020 and 2021 (Thanks, Sergio)
Propose new bylaws
Changes to this year's Worlds to support the vision
Tim Vozar keeps the books at IFPA and prepares the annual tax returns. Thanks, Tim!

Board of Directors

Arthur Ledain (Executive Director, 2020-present)

Julie Symons (Secretary/Assistant Executive Director, 1994-present)

Grischa Tellenbach (Sanctioning Director, 2010-present)

Tim Vozar (Treasurer, 2013-present)

Matt Kemmer (Rules Director, 2020-present)

Sergio Garcia

Chris Siebert

Tuomas Kärki

Peter Bowler

Taishi Ishida

Vision

The new vision from IFPA for the annual World Footbag Championships is to use this event as a place to grow the sport. We need to bring it out of the gym, make it more accessible, and make it more welcoming to young and old, and in between. The number of entrants in the World Championships has been in decline. The last two years, there wasn't even World Footbag Championships, in the traditional sense. The week of Worlds brings together so much talent and enthusiasm for footbag. We want to be able to showcase it more to the public and get the public engaged. The approach is reduce the amount of time required for the competition in the gym, so we have more time out of the gym helping to grow the sport.

It is the intention the IFPA to communicate more and act with transparency to hopefully inspire and raise more participation from the community in IFPA projects. The members of the board want to reorganize the structure of IFPA to support projects. If you have any ideas for projects to help grow the sport of footbag, let us know. There is no need to have an official position in the IFPA to help or conduct footbag related work.

More details about the vision are explained the Youtube videos linked above.

Communications

A short term goal of IFPA is to improve the communications and provide more transparency to what is going on in the IFPA.

Several videos from Arthur have been shared with the members of the footbag community on the IFPA Youtube Channel, announcements of Worlds and Euros, dates and locations, and other news. These have all been referenced in the Highlight sections. (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs3hULDHOVOknWExWBVlLBw).

Links to these communications have been cross-posted on apps such as Facebook Groups (Footbag Net Players, Freestyle Footbaggers), Discord (player channels), and Instagram. The Board has been using Slack to communicate about Worlds and other IFPA business. There is also Email (to your email address registered at footbag.org), which is an option that hasn't been used much recently.

What is the best way for you to hear news from IFPA? Let us know.

Reorganizing IFPA (Bylaws)

Bylaws

As part of restructuring IFPA to be more efficient, we need to update the bylaws the 21st century. It's not that simple, because the members need to vote to approve the changes according to the restrictions in the current bylaws.

Background

IFPA was incorporated in the State of California in 1994. A required part of incorporating is two documents, the “Articles of Incorporation” and the Bylaws define this corporation. In these, we define the purpose of IFPA and outline how the company will be run. These documents are publically available at footbag.org and by request. In 2002, IFPA was formally recognized by the United States Department of Treasury as a public charity. Since then, IFPA has maintained a good standing with the government by conducting business directly related to our stated purposes, meeting the requirements for public charities, and filing annual tax returns. All tax returns are available to anyone upon request.

The purpose of IFPA promote the growth of footbag play as a lifetime recreation and a competitive sport across the world through the dissemination of information about the sport of footbag as well as conducting professional and amateur footbag events.

Updates to the Bylaws

The Board of Directors would like to update the bylaws for several reasons. The primary reason is to make it easier for IFPA to conduct its business. The bylaws were written in 1994 before the internet was pervasive IFPA also changed it demographics with members from around the worlds. We need to adapt the bylaws for the 21st Century. The structure of the Board of Directors and the elections is also partly out-dated.

Here is a summary of the proposed changes

Article II - update address of IFPA principal office in California because Julie moved
Article III - loosen the restriction on sanctioning certain events
Article VI - change from a list of 5 specific elected positions on the Board of Directors to range from 4 to 7, with the minimum elected positions of Executive Director, Treasurer, Secretary, and Assistant Executive Director. (The remaining can be appointed with board approval). Added option for board to vote online. Added sentence defining the next steps if the Executive Director steps down or is removed.
Article VII - change to the elections and terms. Each term will be 2 years, instead of 3. The terms will line up for the elected positions, instead of staggered as before. The time frames for nominations and elections were modified to provide more flexibility. Ideally, nominations an campaigning can take place at Worlds, then have elections shortly thereafter. For election results, we added that results would be communicated electronically, not just on footbag.org.
Article VIII - for meetings, an online meeting option was added for years when there is no World Footbag Championships. We also added an online membership vote option to make changes that require approval by the members of IFPA. Changes to the Bylaws is a change that requires approval by the members of IFPA. The same option for the board to vote online was added here, as was added in previous sections.
Article IX - in the amendments section, we changed the requirements for changing the bylaws to be more flexible and to allow for an online vote. Though, changing the bylaws is something we should only do very seldomly.
Article X - just added email as an option in addition to first class mail for notifying a player of termination or suspension of their IFPA membership.
Miscellaneous typos in Articles I, II, IV, VIII, and X.

Current bylaws - http://footbag.org/ifpa/ifpa-bylaws.html

Proposed bylaws link

Adopting new bylaws

According to the bylaws, the proposed revisions must be shared 30 days in advance of a vote. Then two thirds of the IFPA members must vote to approve the revisions. Voting members of IFPA are those with an active Tier 1 or Tier 2 membership. Please provide any comments or feedback that you have on the revisions to the bylaws. Once, we finalize changes based on player feedback, we can publish the final revisions to be voted on.

Changes in Freestyle Events

There was an announcement on the Facebook freestyle group about changes to the Freestyle events for upcoming Worlds. This thread can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/footbag/permalink/5524579364246886/.

Website updates

IFPA is still relying on the services of footbag.org, which is still being hosted and maintained by Steve Goldberg. Thank you to Steve for maintaining it. Footbag.org is still a great place to go to find event listings and results. It is used annually for online registration for the World Footbag Championships.

Until we have a more comprehensive replacement in place, new development on web content is focusing its work on a landing page geared toward non-players. The new website would provide a splashy display of an image we want to portray to the public to attract kids and young adults and make it fun for them. This project is making progress.

Upcoming Elections and Vote on the Bylaws

Call for nominations If you are interested in participating to help the IFPA grow the sport of footbag, let us know. We are looking for an Executive Director for the next term that starts in January, 2023, and we are looking for project managers and good projects.

Coming soon Vote to update the bylaws. Please review the bylaws and provide input so that we can have a vote.