Insight into the next phase of youth ultimate development.
February 2, 2024 by Charlie Eisenhood in Interview with 0 comments
Dan Raabe served as the Manager of Youth and Education at USA Ultimate from 2015-2019, wearing a number of different hats as the liaison for youth ultimate, coaching development, Spirit of the Game, SafeSport, and other initiatives. When Raabe relocated to Vermont from Colorado Springs, he left the job. Now, though, with remote work a much bigger part of office culture post-pandemic, Raabe has been hired anew, leading his own department as the Director of Youth.
Youth ultimate membership at USAU stagnated before the pandemic and was hit hard by the two years away from serious competition. Raabe re-enters USAU at a time when the organization is refocusing on growing youth ultimate as a part of its latest strategic plan.
I talked with Raabe about the state of youth ultimate and what his goals are as he returns to the national governing body with a new mandate.
Charlie Eisenhood, Editor-in-Chief of Ultiworld: How will your new position as a director level be different from what you were doing before at USAU?
Dan Raabe, Director of Youth at USA Ultimate: It’s different on a couple levels. One, I’m overseeing three employees who are largely doing the production work. So I oversee, I assist, I help on the projects. I do all of that. I do have a few of my own little pet projects, but my primary purpose as a director is helping three other employees be as productive as they can. So I’ve got Dana [Jefferson] in competition, Sam [Callan] in coach education, and Gervon [Williams] in DEI and outreach. The other big difference — and this is more the difference between my position now and my position the first time I was there — is I don’t have to worry about college and club. I get to focus on youth all the time.
I’ve been trying to talk to local disc orgs and one of the things I’ve found already in the job is that you often have some of your best creative thoughts when you’re not working. Like when you’re asleep or you’re making a sandwich or something like your brain is processing stuff in the back of your mind; you don’t even know what’s happening. Now my brain is fully focused on youth and ultimate. So whenever it’s doing that behind the scenes processing work that the human brain does, that’s what it’s thinking about. It’s not worrying about college coaches or who’s gonna be the assistant coach for, you know, U24. And so all of that other stuff is now gone. And so I get to focus really on youth all the time, which I’m super excited about.
What would you say the state of youth ultimate is now compared to when you left the organization as we’ve gone through the pandemic?
Yeah, it’s been interesting. A couple years after leaving USA Ultimate, I coached a high school girls team here at Middlebury High School for a year, coached a YCC team, though we didn’t go to YCCs, we just went down to New York City. So I started to get back into ultimate a little bit, but I was in Vermont. Vermont’s a totally different world. The youth scene here is radically different than those of other places. And COVID affected it.
I then ended up as an assistant principal at an elementary school. So yet again, I sort of got disconnected because I was dealing with five-year-olds and not 15-year-olds. So one of my first jobs has been to really reach out to the local disc organizations and to really get a feel for where they are, because I haven’t been on the ground, I haven’t been at the events. I haven’t gone through those experiences over the past five years like everybody else has. So what I’ve heard and what I’ve found from talking to people, the story is unbelievably consistent: COVID really knocked youth ultimate down. I think that if this had happened in like 2005 or 2008, maybe even 2010, youth ultimate would have been decimated because it just wasn’t stable enough and strong enough and didn’t have some of the established foundation.
I think in 2020 it did have that foundation. That goes back to the work that Kyle [Weisbrod] did when he set up the coaching program and some of the structures that he established way back then. So most of the local disc groups that I talked to were hurt. They were set back a lot, but they’re still doing youth ultimate. They’re still in the game and trying to rebuild it.
The interesting part is that there seems to be more of a rebound on the boys’ side than on the girls’ side, and nobody I can talk to can tell me why. It’s actually something I’ve started talking to some volunteers and some community members about trying to figure out what we can do to try and answer that question, because nobody seems to know. I actually talked to a teacher at the local high school here; I saw them in the grocery store. And they said that in high schools in Vermont, they’re actually looking at reducing the number of girls sports at the varsity level to try and allow some teams to survive, because across the board they have fewer girls participating. So a lot of teams are really struggling, not just in ultimate, but in a lot of other places. And that’s a really small sample. I mean, Vermont is minuscule in terms of population. So that is a tiny, tiny sample. I don’t know what it’s like in other states with girls sports at all. So there’s a real question there — what happened with girls sports and how can we help revitalize that aspect of youth ultimate? It seems that middle school actually has come back, the girls in middle school are coming back, but it’s the high school that’s not.
So how would you say your mandate has changed? I mean, the strategic plan that USA Ultimate just rolled out at the beginning of the year here, which involved your hiring and coming in as a director level and having its own department for youth. There’s really a shift in the focus of the organization. So how would you describe what your task will be as the director of youth and how it’s different from what the organization was doing five or 10 years ago?
I know that the the purpose of creating the Director position was to create that person who was solely focused on youth in ultimate and worried about youth all the time, as opposed to being distracted, which was the reality. Tom [Crawford] would come into my office when I was the Manager of Youth and Education and say, “I want you thinking every day about how to get more of these kids playing ultimate frisbee.” I would say yes. And then I would think about, well, the college coaches are being jerks. I can figure out Spirit of the Game there. And what do I do?
I wasn’t not trying. It’s just the reality of when you have that many hats, you get distracted. So I think that’s the strategic plan set. We need less distraction. We need to focus on this. And now with my role and my focus, I get to then push Dana, Gervon, and Sam and say, “Hey, what are we doing to help grow youth ultimate?” And I get to be that voice in their heads to try and really make sure that they are also focusing on growing youth ultimate.
The other part of it is that I want to work with everybody. So all the local disc organizations, anybody who’s trying to grow youth ultimate — we want to work with them. So I’ve been trying to reach out to every affiliate and state-based organization, but also non-affiliated groups. And I want to hear what their voices are, their opinions, and try and find out what’s going on, and what we can do to help all the different local organizations grow more youth, because the sport’s better off if more youth are playing. And I think kids are better off if more youth are playing. That’s a different thing. So we’re sort of breaking down some of those barriers [between LDOs and USA Ultimate] that I don’t know if they were perceived or real. And that’s the question I can’t answer. I wasn’t really in that realm before working in coach education. I just did the coach education stuff. But I definitely want to work with everybody.
And that’s where I don’t know how it’s changed, to be honest, Charlie, because it didn’t exist before. And I think it’s just saying that the priority has shifted to really honing in on youth. So when we’re looking to hire a new Executive Director for the USA Ultimate Foundation, that person is going to be a major role in supporting youth.
It’s a tall task trying to rebuild from COVID and also trying to support communities in very, very different places in terms of their youth programming. It’s not like there’s some kind of one-size-fits-all solution here; otherwise, it would be done already. So I’ve gotten this question a few times from subscribers who are interested in knowing more about youth stuff. And it’s been kind of an issue the last few years that USA Ultimate has had somewhat fractious relationships with some of the bigger local disc organizations around the affiliate model and state based organization, especially around money and profit-sharing issues. But clearly, there’s an effort now to try to start to repair some of that. From your vantage point, how do you see rebuilding those ties with the DiscNW’s of the world, with the Minnesota Ultimate’s of the world that are doing a lot of really good stuff in youth ultimate — probably the best in many cases — but don’t necessarily have a great working relationship with USAU over the last five years.
Yeah, so I can only speak for myself. And I think the person who can actually answer this question way better than me is Stacey [Waldrup]. When I was at USAU before from 2015 to 2019, I worked with tons of different organizations. I flew up to Seattle and we actually started working on a long-term athlete development program with DiscNW. So I never experienced any real fraction that way. I never had anybody say, ‘we don’t want to work with you.’ So I’ve always experienced my working with all the different disc orgs in a positive way, I think. And I said I’ll let Stacey sort of address like how she’s thinking about rebuilding stuff. I think it’s super important for us to find ways to all work together. I think ultimate is healthier when we support each other, when we help each other, when we’re working together. We can start to get rid of some redundancies, try and make things more efficient in terms of building out resources and sharing the resources, making them accessible to new orgs and supporting them.
I think there’s a lot of ways we can help support all the local disc orgs in what they’re trying to do. And that’s one of the things I see as one of my major jobs. And I think the local disc orgs have done a really good job of helping each other. I know that they have all sorts of different groups where they email, they chat, they meet. I know they do a ton of work where they communicate with each other and support each other and share resources, which is awesome. I don’t want this to sound like I’m saying they shouldn’t. But as I’ve been talking to all the local disc orgs, one of the things I want to do is I want to assist in that. I want to try and take some of that burden off of the organizations because they have a ton of stuff to do locally, and that’s what they want to do.
They don’t want to figure out how to make a new local disc org successful. They want to make their local disc org successful and grow youth ultimate locally. And they’re willing to help and they’re willing to be awesome partners and they’re phenomenal at it and they have experience and knowledge I do not have: I will be connecting and leaning on them big time. But I also think that I have the ability as sort of a person of the national body to become sort of a clearinghouse for a lot of local disc orgs.
What do you tell somebody who is trying to build youth programming in a place where there basically is none? This question comes from someone that said, “I’m in a decently dense area, midsize city with a small summer league and a single club team, an hour away from Philadelphia. What do I prioritize to start building youth?”
I was on the phone last night with a very similar type of group. They have people; they don’t have a ton of ultimate. So it’s really scattered in what they’re doing ultimate-wise. And their question was, ‘what do we do?’ And for me, I think there’s lots of ways you can handle it. You could focus on creating elite club. You could focus on building coaches. You could focus on middle school. You could focus on high school.
You could focus on broad-based club. I think there’s lots of different ways you could grow youth ultimate. And as I talk to local disc orgs, I hear stories of lots of different ways it’s happened. I think that to me, the most important thing is to decide on one thing. Say, okay, we’re gonna grow youth ultimate by doing this thing. And then really staying focused on that item to the exclusion of all the other stuff. We’re not gonna worry about youth and summer league, we’re going to worry about getting coaches into high schools, building high school teams, and building a high school league. Or we’re going to do that with middle school and we’re going to do it for two years and then we’re going to build a high school league on top of the middle school once we’ve built up this population of kids who want to play. I think that’s actually the one model that I don’t know that has been really tried. It’s weird. Ultimate has always sort of gone the opposite way. We’re from older to younger, which seems counterintuitive.
And maybe wrong.
It may be, but we don’t know, because I don’t know that anybody’s really tried it the other way. So I don’t know that there’s a right answer. And there’s tons of questions like — can you get coaches? Do you have people who have that ability to show up at a school building at three o’clock in the afternoon to run a practice after school? Can you use teachers? I know that there are local disc orgs that ran coaching clinics without teams and sort of train the coaches and then said, “Okay, here are the schools you’re assigned to, go into the school, build a relationship, recruit kids, build a team.”
I know that there are ultimate teams that have sort of taken that on and said that this is gonna be our give back to the community, we’re gonna get into youth coaching. Our players are gonna start to go into schools and offer to run stuff and run after school stuff. You gotta figure out how to get the adults, you gotta figure out how to get the kids, and that’s the hard part. I feel crummy, because I don’t know that I can give you a good answer to this question, Charlie, is the reality. But I think it’s that focused effort, and saying this is the way we’re gonna try and do it, and really dialing in on that focus, and understanding what your game plan is and then doing it and not getting distracted. And it takes a ton of time and effort.
And that’s the other part. Like no matter how you do it, it’s like three to five years of tons of just time and time and time and time and time. Although if you’re near Philly, there’s a ton of people. In that case, build a couple teams, go play some tournaments, have some positive experiences. You don’t have to go far. You’ve got lots of populations around you. Get some games in, get the kids psyched, come back, spread the word.
Do we need to try to build more youth programming outside of school based scenarios? Because there’s a lot of red tape typically, especially at the high school level, with building teams and having clubs versus varsity, all that stuff. And when you look at a lot of youth sports, the structures are outside of schools, right? It’s little league baseball, it’s AYSO soccer. And we don’t really have much of that in ultimate right now. Is that something we should be pursuing as a sport overall?
That is a great question. And we are literally in February going to send out a survey, and I’ve mentioned this to every local disc org that I’ve talked to. It’s going to be a very focused survey on youth competition. And it’s gonna ask exactly that question. What does ultimate look like in 10 years? Where do we go?
I think there’s a ton of challenges. Like it’s easy to say, Hey, club would be great. But when is that? A fall season? A spring season? Is that a. A YCC type event with qualifiers? Is that a standalone season with a national championship event or is it just a separate season with Regionals and we don’t have a national championship event and we’re trying to do club as more of a broad-based type experience? So there’s a lot of questions with club about what it looks like, when it is, do we include a mixed division in club, do we include it in school events?
And as you get younger, I think the questions become bigger. I know the school I was at, the elementary school, we were pre-K through sixth grade. All the sports were run through the rec department. There were no school sports. It was the Brandon, Vermont, kids and they all went through Brandon rec department. It’s super weird: you’re forming a school-based team because all the kids are coming from the same school but it’s not attached to the school and you’re using the school’s facilities because the rec programs don’t have their own, so they use the school. So it’s a weird mix once you get into that middle and elementary schools to try and figure out what you do there. So it’s gonna be challenging to figure it out, especially to do it on a national level, because I know no matter what we decide, we’re gonna make a lot of people angry.
Like if we decide to do nothing, we’re going to make people angry. If we decide to run a club season, we’re going to make people angry. If we decide, whenever we decide, we’re going to make people angry, because it’s going to conflict with what they’re currently doing, or it’s not going to be what they were hoping. So we’re going to send the survey out.
If you don’t get the survey between February 15th and 19th, if you’re the head of a local disc org, email me and I will send it to you.
Assuming that there are patterns that are visible, it would really shape, I think, the rest of my career at USA Ultimate. This survey would create that action plan that I would then try and work with the community to try and put in place, build those structures out over the next few years, and over the next 10, 20 years.
From my vantage point, when I look around youth sports and think about my time playing youth sports when I was a kid, it was driven by parents coaching. And that’s not something we have much of in ultimate. It’s pretty rare. We have a lot of what I would call quasi-professional coaches at the higher levels. It’s not their job, but it’s a second job in a way. And then you have elite players who are helping out and coaching high school teams or coaching middle school teams. And that’s all great, but it doesn’t scale. And so how do we create the mechanism for amateur coaches who maybe have never played ultimate to get involved and coach at the lower levels where you’re not trying to win a national championship. You’re just trying to get kids playing. Because it feels like that is one of the missing links that ultimate doesn’t have compared to what other sports like lacrosse, soccer, baseball, everything else, there’s a structure in place for the parent of a kid on the team to become the coach.
Yep. And I have heard this loud and clear from talking to every local disc org. Sam Callan and I have already started trying to work on a certification designed for exactly that. And the way we’re thinking about it is, ultimately, we’ve heard the community said to me that we’ve gotten good at taking ultimate players and turning them into coaches on a national level, but we’re not good at taking non-ultimate players and turning them into coaches, like a teacher who the kids are fired up and the teacher wants to help the kids, but they don’t know how to play ultimate.
All those sort of non-ultimate players who want to get engaged in the sport and want to become coaches, what do we do? And so we’re looking at building out a program which gives them the background and we want to make sure that they are background checked, and give them some base background on the sport, especially if we’re dealing with younger kids, long-term athlete development, and the emphasis on fun as opposed to competition.
Making sure that philosophy is there and that you’re trying to coach all the kids, all that kind of stuff. So we wanna provide them with the legal stuff, some base philosophy stuff, and then we also wanna provide them with the ultimate structure. Curriculum, lesson plans, you know, four to six to eight weeks of practices where it’s written out and videos attached. Here’s how you teach your forehand, here’s how you teach your backhand, and things like that.
I think there’s two challenges that we have that all the sports you mentioned don’t have. Lacrosse might be a little bit more like us. People don’t know what it looks like. I could coach youth soccer because I know what soccer looks like at the professional level. I don’t know the strategies. I don’t know the techniques. I couldn’t coach high school soccer, but I know what soccer looks like. I know what baseball looks like. I know what basketball looks like. I know what football looks like. So I could fake it enough to teach a bunch of little kids how to play the sport, right? I know what it’s supposed to look like to some degree.
People don’t know what ultimate looks like. And I think that’s the biggie. I think they just don’t know, the parents don’t know what they’re teaching. They don’t know that final objective. So we need to figure out ways to sort of help them get past that hurdle.
The second hurdle — and I’m gonna probably hate myself for saying this because I love self-officiated ultimate at the youth level, as I think it provides so many phenomenal learning opportunities — is the fact that there are not refs at the youth ultimate level. I hadn’t thought about this until I was at a coaching clinic and a parent stopped me and talked to me afterwards. It is scary for adults. Because not only do they now have to know how to “coach,” and that’s a pretty low bar, that’s achievable. But when the kids turn to them and say, ‘is that a travel?’ They have to answer the question. They’re supposed to be sort of that expert on the sideline. And they don’t have that ref who they can talk to and say, hey, what happened? What was that rule? Why did you call a foul or something like that?
And I think in youth sports, the refs actually help out those parent coaches a lot because they take some of their responsibility, and they can also be educational for the parents. So I think we need to figure out a way to allow the parents to be comfortable in the rules and to understand that they don’t have to know them really well, that it’s youth sports. It’s like, yeah, you know, we’re not gonna worry about travels unless the kid has taken the frisbee running down the field. That’s a travel. But if they’re dancing in one place because they’re a little kid, that’s not really a travel. That’s just a little kid who doesn’t know what to do because there’s another little kid standing in front of them.
And so to take that pressure off of them and say here’s the basic rules. Here’s how you teach it. Here’s how you talk about it in the game. Don’t stress out about all this other stuff. It’s not important. What’s important is the kids getting out and playing games with a Frisbee and having fun or a disc and having fun.
So much of the discourse around ultimate and like getting new people involved is about getting the barriers to entry lower and lower and lower and lower, right? Free, you know, sliding scale. There are all these ways it’s like we don’t want cost to be a burden. But I feel that, counterintuitively, the emphasis on not charging money and making it as low budget as possible is actually causing it to be harder to grow youth ultimate because there’s no mechanism for organizations to actually earn money. There’s no profit motive for entrepreneurs to come in and start a youth league where they do all of the organizational stuff and they just have parents coaching and they make a little bit of money.
And there’s just not the same ability to provide the things that make it a better experience. Like, for instance, having an observer at these youth games, who can be there to be an observer and give the rules and properly officiate in the way that ultimate does its officiation. And I think that parents of young kids or high schoolers can understand that, okay, the officiating works differently, they call their own fouls, and then there’s somebody there to say whether it was or not. And that is like, can be different, but it’s still somebody is there and in charge of the game. But you have to pay that person to be there. We cannot expect observers to be working for free and, to be honest, even at the highest levels of college and club, they’re horribly underpaid right now.
So I’m just curious for your take on this, because obviously we do not want cost to be something that keeps anybody out of ultimate. And I think there’s ways of doing that without sacrificing the need to actually have it make money in order for it to be a sustainable thing that we can do into the future for the local disc orgs and the people who do all the support for the leagues.
Yeah. So I was an econ major in college and I taught economics for 18 years. So we could do this for like four hours. I’d have to get a whiteboard board and start drawing graphs. So I have so many thoughts and I want to be careful because I think the intention is so important and valuable. I think the ultimate goal to make sure that people can access the sport is a really powerful one. And I think when you look at other sports that boomed up recently, I think a lot of them have a lot of barriers that they then had to go backwards and undo. And it was a challenge for them. So I think being thoughtful about it as we grow I think is super important.
That said, I agree with you 100%. I don’t know if I want observers at middle school games. We could have that discussion, but I think that local disc orgs succeed when they’re able to earn enough money to pay people a living wage so that they can dedicate their lives to helping the youth ultimate or local ultimate scene flourish. My experience in watching different orgs is that when they start to pay people money, they relatively quickly start hiring more employees. By hiring one person and paying that person and having that person work full time and growing ultimate in that community opens up a ton of opportunities and, as a result, revenue, which then allows that org to start to do more stuff.
There are ways to take in resources, reallocate resources, and make sure that the sport is accessible. It is by its nature super cheap. We don’t have helmets. We don’t have pads. We don’t have massively expensive equipment.
So in the local scene, we can keep the cost down for ultimate really easily and make it accessible, I think, very easily. And as you said, I think parents are willing to pay money for their kids to have a great experience. And if it costs a little bit of money to have a great experience, and some of that money then goes to keep down the cost for other kids to access the same experience, great.
In my experience, when I worked in high school, I’ve never had a parent complain, because I would say at my parent meeting every year, here’s my fees, I charge this and then we take the money and if kids can’t afford stuff, we reallocate it. So some of you are probably going to pay money that’s going to help another kid access the support. The parents were always like, ‘yeah, that’s awesome. We have no problem with that.’ So you got to be careful with that. You got to make sure that kids understand that the money is there. You have to make the ability to access that money easy. You gotta be smart with all of that. So that’s super important.
One of the things we struggle with is that we don’t have enough coaches. And I think, honestly, one of the answers is to pay them a little bit. And you don’t have to pay them a ton, but I think if you’re a person and you’re giving the time and effort, like you said, it’s a second job for a ton of individuals in our community, and they don’t get paid.
I don’t think they need to get paid a lot, but I think a little bit would say, hey, we appreciate what you’re doing. Here’s some money. So if you’re a high school basketball coach, you’re going to make like $3,000-$6,000 for a season, which seems like a lot of money, I think, but for the teachers and for the coaches, they’re like, if you do it out by the hour, like this is ridiculous. It’s massively underpaid.
But they do it and they get some money. They get to take a vacation, put some money away for their kids’ college. And they consider it a win. The school has the coaches and that’s a win. So there’s benefit there. So I think the ability to generate revenue, be smart with that money, redistribute it, and help the sport grow is key.
Charging money for things is not inherently bad. If ultimate grows and we don’t charge money to provide a really easy, technologically accessible schedule, if we don’t provide an experience that’s easy for the parents — and you do that by charging money and having somebody who’s organizing everything — then the parents with money are going to start to pay more money to somebody else who’s just looking to make an AAU-type situation, where they’re just looking to try to get big, big bucks off of the sport because there’s pent up demand. Because then the parents would say, ‘I used to pay $5,000 for their single season of soccer when they were 10. And this organization’s asking me for $3000 and they love ultimate. I’m going to pay $3000.’ And so I want to make sure that we’re providing an experience that doesn’t reach that level of cost, where it really starts to become organizations that are prohibitively expensive and people can’t get into those organizations, and there is that split — sort of the haves and the haves not. But we gotta make sure what we provide is accessible and good. Like it can’t just be accessible, it has to be good. And you gotta have organizers to do that.
This isn’t really your job, but you’re talking about the technological experience of making it easy — schedules, all that stuff. But is that where USAU’s role is, then, because local disc orgs aren’t going to have the resources right now to have their own IT people building out apps and all this stuff. And, you know, there are some options on the market right now, but they’re relatively under developed at this point.
And USAU IT is still dark ages, to be honest. And I know that that’s being worked on, but how important is this for youth ultimate to have technological tools for doing organization and managing waivers and making that seamless for parents and organizations and local orgs.
I think it is really important. And I say that knowing, hey, it’s not my job. So it’s easy for me to say, cause I then don’t have to go out and do it. And that the technology is massively time consuming and expensive. I haven’t done this personally because I’m not in the tech department, but anytime we’ve gone out to do stuff, the cost and the experience has been really expensive and it takes a lot more time than people thought. We have the new employee — you guys were talking about this in your last podcast — we got Jason, who’s got a ton of background in this area, seems like a really, he seems like a great guy, and he’s really focused on development of new stuff and really trying to move that technology forward. But I think from the parent side, it’s super important.
I was talking to a guy about youth soccer. So that $5,000 number I mentioned for a 10-year-old soccer league — that actually came from talking to a guy who talked about a soccer league in his town. It was $5,000 for 10 and 11-year-olds. They didn’t play anybody except for kids in other states. They didn’t play anybody in the state they’re from, which is all crazy. And he said the biggest difference between the experience of those kids and the experience of kids at every other club in the state was that for the parents, the technology was super easy. They went on their phone, and they clicked like two boxes. The money was spent, they had the schedule, everything was there, and it was super, super easy. He said that was largely the biggest difference besides the travel, obviously, but he said a lot of the stuff was actually sort of the same — you get the same skill building experience on the field in both of the cheaper and the more expensive programs. It’s that external experience that’s really different.
So I think it is important to figure out ways to make technology accessible, especially for non-ultimate players who are trying to figure out what they’re supposed to do and how does this work differently for this sport vs. other sports. Yeah, we got to make it better and simpler, and I know Stacey’s working on that massively and I know it’s not easy, but I think it is important for youth ultimate to evolve.
If we don’t, I think it will be a barrier for kids and for parents.
Last thing, do you anticipate any changes to the structure of YCC in the near term?
That’s what one of the things the survey is asking about. What’s the appetite in the community for actual change to the structure of YCC? So that’s a question we’re asking. So I don’t have an answer because I’m gonna let the community sort of give me the feedback. We’re trying to build the survey out so that we can filter it a bunch of different ways, large, small, has participated in YCC, has not, wants to, all that kind of stuff, so we can filter out answers and find patterns. But I think there is the potential for change, which I think is kind of exciting. I think it’s challenging. I know there’s a ton of different ideas out there and how they work and how they actually function on the ground is a challenge.
Well, thanks a lot, Dan. Really appreciate your time. And so, again, this survey is coming out sometime in middle February.
It’ll be February either 15th or 19th, and it’ll be emailed directly to the local disc orgs. If they don’t get it, email me. And the other thing is I’ve been trying to reach out and talk to all the local disc orgs across the country. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the first two, three weeks of my job. So if there’s a local disc org that didn’t get an email from me and wants to reach out and talk youth ultimate, they could email me again. It’s [email protected].
Great. Well, thank you very much, Dan. Appreciate your time.
