MISSA News

MAILING LIST. The mailing list is open to all. If it was forwarded to you, you can join the list at http://tinyurl.com/MISSA-mail. If you are no longer involved in high school sailing there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, but before you use it, please do forward it to the people currently leading your old team.

FALL SEASON RECAP. When we sent out a survey in the fall, the results made a couple priorities clear: everyone wanted to be safe, but also really wanted to make sure at least some sailing happened. With state and local guidelines on youth sports and travel varying greatly across the Midwest, this meant we were unable to have any MISSA-wide events, but we did what we could to support and promote local regattas and scrimmages wherever and however venues were able to pull them off legally and safely.  MISSA ended the fall season with 55 registered teams and with a total of 35 regattas hosted in the district.  These numbers represent more than half of all the high school sailing teams and regattas in the whole country for the fall of 2020. Thank you to all the clubs, coaches, volunteers, and parents who made adjustments and sacrifices to pull this off.

SPRING SCHEDULE. The spring season schedule is a work in progress, but we are putting events on the schedule and working to make them happen.  The final call on each event will be made as the Covid-19 situation evolves over the next few months. I wanted to share what we know so far.  Baker (team racing) nationals are scheduled for May 22-23 in Florida, and Mallory (fleet racing) nationals are scheduled for June 5-6 at The Foundry in Cleveland. We moved the Mallory later than usual in order to increase the odds of being able to fit in a season of qualifiers that includes as many schools as possible.  This will allow us to delay  pre-qualifiers until April 10, by which time we hope more states will be seeing trends allowing them to ease restrictions. On Thursday, the ISSA national board made the call to officially cancel the Cressy (singlehanded) national championship for the 2020-21 school year. This was originally scheduled for Florida in the fall, then was tentatively set for spring in Rhode Island. A combination of sponsorship issues, venue availability, and scheduling conflicts led us to the decision to call off the Cressy and focus on trying to make Mallory and Baker happen this spring. We will still try to have the MISSA Singlehanded Championship this spring.

As dates for qualifiers and other MISSA regattas become more firm and NORs are available, they will be posted on the schedule on our website. Meanwhile, as always, the planning version of the MISSA schedule is visible to all at http://tinyurl.com/MISSA-schedule. Check frequently for updates as the situation is necessarily fluid.

MISSA ORGANIZATION. MISSA, along with our parent organization ISSA and the other six geographic districts, has gone through a legal restructuring over the last year. The main goals of this process have to do with liability protection and financial and tax reporting. This will not have any significant impact on our regattas, membership, or day-to-day operations, but we will start using slightly different terminology to describe the way we are organized.  Each district is making some changes, with the goal of having a consistent governance structure and common terminology to describe it.  What we have previously called the MISSA Board, is now called the District Committee, and my role will be called the District Director.  Our geographic areas of East, West, and Central will now be referred to as Leagues rather than Areas.  Each League will be led by a League Representative, assisted by a League Committee. 

The District Committee elected for 2021 at the December 2020 Annual Meeting is:

• Ted Anderson, (District Director)
• Sharon Murphy Garber (MISSA Rep on ISSA Board)
• Jeff Hudson (Treasurer)
• Matt Thompson (West League Representative)
• Lynn Frikker (East League Representative)
• Zac Hernandez (Central League Representative)

We are still in the process of forming the League Committees.

GETTING MORE INVOLVED. High school sailing would not be possible without the dedication of so many adult volunteers, coaches, and club/school staff.  Each year, I have many people tell me that they’d like to get more involved. There are lots of ways to do this: from serving on a League Committee or District Committee to helping with a local race committee or regatta planning committee.  We are going to be setting up some online training sessions for those looking to learn about race committee, scoring high school sailing in TechScore, regatta management, etc. If any of this is of interest to you, please fill out this quick form: http://tinyurl.com/MISSA-volunteers. Please share this with anyone who might be interested.

I will continue to keep you posted as the spring season gets closer. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Ted Anderson
MISSA District Director
708 420 5233
sailingmissa@gmail.com