Hello Good People!
The National Collegiate Dodgeball Association is busy. Let’s just start with that. We had a smash opening Autumn to the 2014 Season, with 90 matches played and 17 events hosted. We saw the Inducting Matches of three teams: St Ambrose of Iowa, Davenport U and Siena Heights of Michigan.
With the efforts of Interim Treasurer Felix Perrone [WKU], we’ve even registered as a non-profit in the State of Kentucky, bringing us on a road to official IRS tax exempt status. On the administrative side we are writing the Constitution, Bylaws, Policy needed to maintain a national organization.
The Coding team is busy developing out our very own RPI system, addressing the unique problems with a decentralized league without a set amount of games per season. We’ll have a formal discussion and vote for that very soon. So keep your eyes peeled and check your email.
Piggybacking on the League’s infrastructure, I’ve started developing a kind of organization for Dodgeball Officials, the idea being that alumni and seasoned referees can register, and event planners can look up a nearby Official to provide a fair and finely officiated event. Along that same idea, we have Kyle Peltier [GVSU] and dev team working on an Officials’ App. It combines stop watches, shot clocks, score keeping and data keeping in a simple app for your Android phone. Amazing things in the pipeline.
Let’s keep eyes on the goal through; with the many dodgeball organizations out there, we should know our place and do the best in our area. We are College Dodgeball, there are no organizations out there exclusively dedicated to the Collegiate Student Athlete. We play with rubber dodgeballs, with an aggressive and competitive ruleset developed over the past 10 years by our university attending peers. We are family, bathtub pictures and all.
The Staff of the NCDA keeps this in mind. We should always be looking to help out our brother and sister dodgeball organizations around the world, which would allow our student athletes the ability to play even more dodgeball during their education and setting them up beyond. But at the very core, we have so much work to do at home! We have produced an amazing organization already, and there are plenty of areas to improve.
The NCDA Dodgeballer can always help improve this League. The Staff and myself keep our work as decidedly open source as possible. If you have some ideas on improving the RPI, post in the forum section for our Coding team to see! If you want to write an article about your first college dodgeball tournament, email us a guest article! We’ll put it up on the website. So much work has come together from volunteers, and all has made the League stronger.
On a similar note, if you want to volunteer even more time as a member of the Staff, we would both appreciate and value it. The NCDA has plenty of resume/portfolio building credibility, and plenty of people who can write you recommendations as needed.
I’m proud to put whatever time I have into the League, and I would love to work full time. Captains, Dodgeballers, Officers, Officials; I rely on your efforts in many ways. I strive to make my available time as efficient as possible. A little work from you can make my job a hell of a lot easier. That also makes our small staff more efficient as well. Post your match results in the forum as soon as your done. Check your team’s contact email regularly. Submit your paperwork and dues on time!
I started working with the League by seeing we could have a better system at recording results. From that simple 2 hours a week in my spare time, it expanded to designing the website, and maintaining teams of coders and writers, and putting some really cool concepts into production. I never dreamed we could really get an NCDA application to help Officials do their duties. Never considered we’d end up an incorporated organization or that we’d cover more than just a dozen teams across the Midwest. I feel we’ve truly broken from our Midwest Dodgeball Conference and become the NCDA with the past two seasons.
If anyone has any questions, comments, concerns, issues, please let me know. I’m all about keeping a dialog and making sure I’m doing the right thing by everyone.
And as always, thanks for reading.
Zigmas Maloni
NCDA President
