This is mainly going to be a rant, so if you get offended - tough - do something positive and tell me and I’ll post a mea culpa here for you.

I received the USFA newsletter last night (and in our work inbox this morning) and man was I underwhealmed. There are several great items of news to talk about and this email posts two things: The Election and Beijing Olympics.

Both of these are great topics and deserve the attention of the USFA membership. What got me was that I was left unfulfilled and unmotivated by the newsletter. This looks to have been banged out in just a few minutes - certainly less time than I’m taking with this posting today - and it could have been so much better.

Note to self - Get the next Fencing.Net newsletter out today or tomorrow and write up those stories on the plate!

The first topic covered was the USFA Election. This is huge. We, the membership, get to vote on the direction of the USFA. Now, I’m happy that the newsletter did not work to endorse any one specific candidate or set of candidates, but it was one run-on paragraph and did not include links to either platform.

If this election is so important, why not spend some time on it. If we want good governance, then let’s get people to get informed of the topics and issues and the candidates. Fencing.Net has a separate discussion forum set up for the USFA 2008 Election with 43 discussion threads and over 2000 posts. There are also the platform web sites at USFA Nominees, which is the slate that the USFA nominating committee came up with and the US Fencers for Change, which are the candidates that petitioned to get us an election.

Fencing.net also posted an Interview with Tracy Hurley as well as video from a town hall meeting with Kalle Weeks and Brad Baker.

The next was a short paragraph on the Olympics, how we have 15 athletes competing, and asking us to cheer.

How about a news item about Sada Jacobson retaking the World #1 ranking, or the US Women’s Sabre Team retaking the #1 team points lead from France? How about Keeth Smart taking 2nd at the Venuzuela World Cup?

Heck, just let us know that there will be an FIE Grand Prix in the United States this weekend in Las Vegas where a number of our athletes will be competing.

Sorry for the rant, but the USFA finally attempts to get a newsletter going, but I’ve only received 11 news updates since November 2006 and they seem to have started coming out monthly in the last 3 months. There is so much more that can be done here by the national federation.

Now, I’m going to go back and finish writing up some of the fencing news articles to go out.

BTW - Look for a big announcement next week on a way every fencer can really help out fencing, in a way that’s going to be really cool.