The President’s Corner

True in business and chess is a 1910 quote from Harold Green, CEO of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company: “words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises, but only performance is reality.” Year end 2006 OCA numbers are performance reality for our leadership and demonstrate the steadfast growth of OCA goals both long term and short term.

Last year, the OCA Policy Board made a leap of economic faith and enacted several changes in membership fees and the printed Oklahoma Chess Bulletin (OCB) costs. The results are very fresh and still require more data experience before suggesting a permanent vote on these changes, but the preliminary news is good. The Oklahoma chess news is even better when compared to the slightly negative national trends. Our scholastic affiliate, OSCO, delivered reality in a big way. Mike Swatek, the OSCO Secretary details their numbers in the Editor’s message in this issue.

In all, the USCF Oklahoma chess participation trend for Oklahoma players at both OCF and OCA open tournaments combined is up since July of 2003 by 25%. Accordingly, the total number of tournaments during the last three years has also increased by 26%. With more players and more tournaments, Oklahoma players are on average annually participating in 1.5 more open tournaments for all ages. The number of players participating in OCA tournaments increased 64% in 2006 alone!

Although long term OCA growth is positive, the short term numbers for 2005 to 2006 show very strong increases and may add support to our experimental Policy Board business decisions and tournament structure changes. The current OCA trend supports a direction of more one day family friendly tournaments with faster time limits. Our new plans include the first ABOK Action Swiss G/30 in Collinsville on May 5^th along with future 4 round progressive time limit tournaments (G/30, G/45, G/60, G/90). The expansion of one day events sprinkled in between the major two day tournaments are very practical for our membership and volunteer staff.

OCA Membership included for participation in several tournaments since June was another forward looking change of the last year. Membership included has slightly lowered the financial barriers for our tournament chess players. The OCA now tracks memberships and expiration dates without printed membership cards. One less item to check during tournament registration helps our larger tournaments to start on schedule.

The move toward electronic publishing made 2006 a very stable year for our finances. In the past, the OCB was the major budget expense and consumed nearly all of our membership resources. With the publication primarily on the lower cost website, OCA now has more available resources for other projects and events.

Another unintended consequence is in our tracking numbers on the electronic publication. The electronic counters give us feedback into the website chess interests of our membership. The category winners by total hits per day as of Jan 07 are the following: (1) Schedules (2) What’s new? (3) Interactive Games and (4) Tournament Results. The OCB readership appears to be a one time read for the most part and lags all other hit categories. Performance of the OCA website has an outstanding overall 135% year over year increase in readership hits. Since we reduced the politics, our only readership year to year negative was a decrease in OCB hits per day.

Numbers and graphs are sometimes subjective but useful tools for our leadership in future goals. The current sets of numbers portray OCA leadership in a good light after three years, but also give us inspiration for improvements. For example, our adult USCF membership growth exceeds the national averages, yet the 3% increase this year is not a spectacular number. The Policy Board is already active in addressing the long term growth issues of the membership. The first step towards improving membership numbers is likely found in more one day events.

In summary, 2006 was a good year for the OCA and 2007 promises solid growth and more events. My thanks to the volunteers, membership support and Policy Board team for making 2006 OCA performance a great reality!

Happy New Year!

Chuck Unruh, OCA President