All-Star New Usasf Warmup Room Requirements

[catlady]

Malls, Amusement Parks, Churches and Neighborhoods are the top four places parents feel safe allowing their kids to roam around without supervision, or so I was told in the early 1990's when I became a closing manager at a department store. Security told us, parents are fools to drop their kids off at malls, people are crazy to walk alone in the parking lots and bomb threats at malls are a weekly event (even back in the early 1990's). They, also, told us that crime rarely hits the news when it happens at a place that generates a lot of tax dollars, sexual assaults are more likely to happen by people you know and trust, and abductions are more likely to happen in your neighborhood.

What I will say about Malls, Six Flags/Disney, and Convention Centers is they have a lot of cameras around and employ undercover and uniformed security, you will be happy to know they have much more undercover than uniformed. Warm ups, whether in the EP designated area or if your gym has room they have leased, are the only time I can think of where us parents are not allowed to have a visual of our kids. If coaches have to have background checks, the convention center has cameras and uniformed/undercover security then, IMO, Varsity has tried to provide as much of a safe place as they can where parents are not allowed. Otherwise, we are allowed to hover as much, or as little, over our kids as we like.

 

[mollymags]

It seems like everyone is very concerned about how EP's are handling this, so I figured I'd share. I work for an independent EP that runs about 30 events a year and one of the owners of our company was in Vegas a few weeks ago for USASF meetings where this topic was covered.

Our entire office staff is required to pass the NCSI background check (same one coaches are required to take). We've all done it within the past week and are waiting for the green light approval (it takes up to 10 days). We have a small group of individuals who work at least half of our events every season and have for years- those event staff members will be required to do the background check as well.

We have an office staff of 10, and maybe 7 additional people who work for us often, so we have to bring in fundraising groups to work at nearly all of our events. It's not realistic for us to background check all of them. However, we are making an effort to reach out to our fundraising groups to find people within those groups who have passed some sort of background check for their major, their job, babysitting, etc., so that we can put those individuals in warm up if we need to. We are making every effort to ensure that anyone working in a backstage job (warm up, escort from warm up to on deck, on deck) has passed a check. People who have not passed the background check will be put in jobs in public areas, like working at the t-shirt stand, doing floor security, door security, admissions, etc. Additionally, we will not allow anyone who has not passed a background check to keep their phone on them while working- everyone has a phone with a camera, this cuts down on any risks from that.

We are also looking into adding signage around events, similar to the "if you see something, say something" signs you see on public transit and in airports. We are also looking into bringing undercover officers from the town the event is in to patrol the event. The sad reality is that we have to have individuals escorted out of events by venue security or local police at LEAST once per season for being "creepy" (for lack of a better word). This is actually the exact reason we do not allow telephoto lenses into events- it has nothing to do with trying to make money off action photos (we don't even offer action photos). We've caught too many people in the stands, taking zoomed in pictures of random teams with no affiliation. It's scary, and the more aware we can make people of it, and the more people we can keep out of areas away from parents, the better- and hopefully it will scare the undesirable people away.

I love this new rule, both as an EP and as a coach. Seeing someone call this "just another added expense for parents" is ridiculous, honestly. Maybe it will be inconvenient for some, but it's going to protect the kids... and the kids are the most important thing to all of us.

 

[mollymags]

What does this mean for rec or school teams that aren't registered with USASF? I'm not a USASF registered coach because we are a school team, but we go to warm ups at the same location as everyone else. I wonder if I will have to bring something from my school saying I passed the background check they required, or will they just require that everyone pay the coach registration fee regardless of if you coach a "all star" team or not. .

EPs are being asked to set up the schedule so that school and rec teams are warming up at a different time than all-star teams- so you'll probably see school and rec teams slotted in their own session, or at the beginning or end of a session so they are in the warm up gym at a different time than the AS teams.

 

[Mom2Cheergirls]

I love this new rule, both as an EP and as a coach. Seeing someone call this "just another added expense for parents" is ridiculous, honestly. Maybe it will be inconvenient for some, but it's going to protect the kids... and the kids are the most important thing to all of us.[/QUOTE]

Thank you for all your information it is very helpful and I applaud your organization for doing that. I would like USASF to make some sort of rule requiring that but I truly appreciate your info and the steps your group is taking and I hope you put that out there publicly that your group is doing this.

 

[catlady]

National criminal background checks are really pretty inexpensive. I paid $15 at the county courthouse to have a state wide check and if I remember correctly, it was $25-$40 or $50 to have a national background check. For the price of a couple bows, I'd call that a bargain. I do believe the biggest risk at these comps are where people take phone shots of the athletes warming up and stretching in the hallways and posting them online to those creepy sites. My guess is most of those kids/adults don't have a history and when a person can have their phone in their hand and look like they're casually walking by, that just makes it harder to report suspicious behavior. Something as simple as getting some of these dividers to block non-official warm up areas in hallways could help, at least if someone was sticking their hands through the screen you could recognize it as suspicious behavior.

ETA: My divider pic wouldn't post but, on Amazon they're $30 for a 72" x 72" cardboard screen.