Is "association manager" the same thing as "association president" or are we talking about the old field rep position?
I've been an association president before. I didn't get paid a thin dime, not that I ever sought pay for it. I did it because I love the sport.
Our local dues at the time went into putting on the local tournament, maintaining the book and paying for the equipment to properly inspect the lanes (meaning, buying tape, etc.). And on that last subject, the tape reader we had took a specific width of tape that conveniently caused it to be about 5x or 10x as expensive as garden-variety tape. Reminded me of the problem on Apollo 13 with the CO2 scrubbers being round in the command module and square in the LEM...
As for the old field reps, I remember looking up an employment ad for that once and the position paid around $32,000, which was more than I was making at the time at my "real" job. I was told by one of our association elders not to even waste my time applying for it, because even with the resume I had at the time, I would not get a call. It would be a very political deal, he told me. I applied anyway, and never heard anything. Had I been hired to do it, I was planning to approach it like an actual full-time job and really do something. The only time I met our field rep -- and I saw him exactly once in about 10 years -- he came to a local center, smoked about a carton of cigarettes in a half hour, told everyone we were doing a ****ty job in his opinion, then informed us we needed to buy him dinner.
My current association, thank God, is much different. We have a dozen or so very helpful volunteers. We give out a wide array of awards, and they're not just a bunch of cheap stuff. I use the pens they give out for high games and series as the pens my clients use to sign contracts. The stuff that's printed on them has led to a few conversations, which has allowed me to recruit people to the sport. Our association puts on multiple tournaments, has a strong relationship between adults and youth in the youth program, and goes way above and beyond.
The old association had some good people, just not enough. The current association is flush with great folks.
The problem with the whole system is that some associations -- and a large percentage of the national/regional organization -- don't want to recruit. Recruiting is hard. It is done face-to-face, and it takes a lot of sweat equity to do it right. There has been a lot of local and national money pi**ed away while the people who needed to be busting hump chose to sit there and do nothing. If that attitude doesn't change, and fast, the USBC will fold down into the BPAA and I don't see that as a good thing at all.
Jess
