Club Director News: With the Commish
What to know for the 2025-26 Season
The 2025 Fall General Assembly was a wonderful opportunity to gather with so many of our members, and we’re grateful to everyone who took the time to attend. Your participation and feedback help us continue growing stronger as a Region, and while there are a few areas we’ll improve on for next time, the event brought valuable conversations, fresh ideas, and a renewed focus on keeping our athletes and community thriving.
2025 Fall General Assembly & Junior Forum: Remarks from Commissioner Harold Cranswick
The 2025 Fall General Assembly has come and gone but, after debriefing with a number of people, it is clear that several items still need to be addressed.
To begin with, as mentioned at beginning of the meeting, the Region truly appreciates the fact that so many of our members took the time to attend the Fall General Assembly. However, there are a couple of concern that deserve some explanation at the very least..
First, while it is unusual for the FGA to include guest speakers, we hope you understand that the SafeSport presentation was a joint decision that came out of the May National USAV meetings. Both the National Office and our Region hope you see the value of continuing to expand our understanding of the issues in SafeSport and to appreciate the effort to keep our young athletes safe.
The presentation by Dr. Fry just happened to present itself as a result of an interaction at the High Performance Championships. Dr. Fry presented a number of ideas, some of which you may have known but hopefully you were presented with a few new ideas that you might find applicable in the future.
And while both speakers provided important and useful information, our debriefing session enlightened us about several things we could and will do better in the future should we ever consider having guest speakers again.
Secondly, we know your time is valuable and that most of you attended the FGA to hear a brief recap of the past year but, more importantly, you wanted information about the upcoming season. Since you did not receive that information, I want to take this opportunity to share that information now and to let you know that we recognize our mistake and that it will not happen again.
While not an excuse, there are a number of items from the Junior Forum Survey that I can now report on that we could not report at the FGA because they hadn’t been presented, reviewed and/or approved by the Board. The results of the Survey were not tallied and compiled before the last Board meeting following the Retreat so those Survey items had to be postponed until the next Board meeting. That next Board meeting took place immediately following the FGA.
As you can quickly see, the Board had many items to consider. Some included minor changes while others were clearly going to impact the Region Budget. In almost every case, the result of the outcome for the question would impact the staff so the Board needed to be informed and supportive before any changes could occur.
In sum, clearly this is important information to Club Directors and it would have taken considerable time to present. Nevertheless, we needed to address all of the information above. That’s on us and we apologize. In the future, we will either present it at the Breakout Session or we will announce, in advance, how the information will be shared.
Sincerely,
Harold W. Cranswick
Commissioner
Arizona Region of USA Volleyball
Region e-mail: harold@azregionvolleyball.org
