I believe that good management of a chess club of any size requires leadership from a group of people focused on the future of the club.  Team USA Southeast is no exception.  I have a lot of ideas about what Team USA Southeast might be able to offer its members besides a chance to play in the World League (ladder tournament?  class tourneys?  state vs. state matches?  monthly columns by our own players?)  Perhaps you do, too.  I'd like to use this forum as a means to exchange some ideas about how we might manage our future activities.

I'd also like to encourage anyone with an interest in being an Admin for the Team (i.e., working behind the scenes with me to line up matches, promote new ideas, get new members, and manage/improve the team's website) to contact me.  If there are enough people interested, I could establish a separate chess.com page for Team USA Southeast Admins for our convenience.

I agree... although I must ask, as a new member of the Team. What are the usual activities that Teams host?

I'm glad that I've seen this topic. I've been thinking about why we've been losing matches that we joined in the World League. I've come up with few reasons that are logical to me. I haven't got the time to do some researches but I'm pretty sure that the major reason for that is the games that have been lost by timeouts.

Second, it is hard to admit but obviously, the group's main page is not only unatractive to certain type of users, but there is really less action going on in here. These two factors together are creating a potential group of "inactive" users. In other words, people don't care no matter what team game they are in.

So in my opinion, we need to start thinking about focusing on these first degree problems and then try to come up with some effective ideas or solutions and maybe make some discussions on what can be done regarding to the problems.

I got some ideas that might be found useful somehow.

Team USA Southeast could still use some more volunteers to help run our team activities.  There are many teams smaller than ours who have multiple people as Admins and Super Admins.  You must be a premium member to get those privileges, though. 

I think some of the above is simply wrong. I for example play in fewer matches than I used to simply because I don't have time for more games. I have been slammed by too many second round tournaments cranking up at the same time. 

One tournament can equal 6 or more matches depending on the ratings. 

Other reasons we get poor participation is I always seem to get paired against much stronger players in SE Team MAtchess. I suspect we just don't have a stong enough team at the top.

Further, the dropout rate in Chess.com is very high. They claim over 1,000,000 members and yet even using pretty liberal total player numbers they clain barely 300,000 in turn-based chess. 

On the above, nobody really gives a crap what the home page looks like. If that's a problem, it's WAY sown the list. 

Clean out the dead wood, invite inactives to get with the program or boot them out, recruit new members that have high ratings, require at least 10 completed games before people can join - the beginners are the most likely to forfeit. These are things that will work. Put the effort where the points are, not on esoteric stuff. 

It takes a lot of effort to make these things work. 

I will volunteer to help!!

I have already gotten the ball rolling on clearing the dead wood.  In the last couple of months, I've deleted dozens of people from the Team USA Southeast roster who had not been on-line for a year or longer. 

Our placement in Division A last year meant that we were obligated to provide a minimum of 50 boards in our WL matches.  After our debacle against Germany, we were never able to surpass this minimum in our remaining matches.  In fact, I had to re-set two matches to allow us to play with less than 50 people, and make personal entreaties to many players to play.  We have had a continuing problem with not having a high percentage of our higher-rated players participate in the WL, which has led to a very large number of our other people playing up, often by hundreds of points.

We will be playing in Division B in 2011, with a 30 board minimum that will be much more manageable.