USAPL Vice President
Larry Maile
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Vice President's Message
December, 2001
Vice President's Address
This final report of 2001 marks the end of a very successful year for USA Powerlifting. We have done well, nationally and internationally.
One of the most positive things to occur in USAPL this year is the decrease in the first 9 months of both drug test positives, and positives for substances found in over-the-counter steroids. In the period between January 1st and September 30th, we had 11 positive tests. This is an improvement over past years where the number was higher. The largest component was of nandrolone positives, and while that is still true, the absolute number is lower. Hopefully, people are getting the information that drug test failures occur with a number of supplements that can be purchased at your local health food stores.
Another bright spot is in the recruitment of new meet promoters. Several areas of the country are again represented in USAPL meets. These include: Pennsylvania, Southern California (almost a region by itself), and Colorado. While there have been meets in these areas to some degree in the past several years, changes of personnel with renewed energy can only benefit the lifters in these areas. Also in that vein, there are new State Chairs in Colorado, Utah, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Michigan (I apologize if I've forgotten anyone). Welcome aboard and keep up the good work you've started.
This year, as you are all aware, we initiated our online newsletter, Powerlines. This issue is number 5. We include items of interest to USAPL members, including articles, profiles, and meet results. The newsletter is coordinated by Mr. Mike Armstrong, who is doing a great job. Results reach our membership in a timely manner, and each lift is included in our online database, which can be queried for bests individual lifts, and total, by weight class, and age group. To facilitate this, PLEASE send in your results in electronic format. MSWord, Excel, or text files can be converted. This provides an enormous time savings in keying in data. Please also include THE AGE of the competitor, so that their results can be included in the appropriate category. All are included in the open division.
Our international, traveling teams have done very well this year, and although I won't review this again in detail, we have demonstrated across the board that our lifters are competitive with the best in the world. Since our last issue, our Open Men's Team placed third in Sotkamo, Finland and the Bench Press Team also received accolades in New Zealand (please see articles).
Thanks in large measure to contributions of our corporate sponsors, and the austerity measures put into place by your Executive, we are on sound financial footing as we close this year. While we will face increasing costs, including insurance and fixed costs such as postage, power, etc., we generally doing well.
The National Office has purchased, long past time, an new computer system such that our data based can be updated to a more usable format that allows us to avoid the large amounts of staff time that were previously required to monitor our membership statistics. The National Office staff are attending classes on data management, and hope to have the changeover complete in the next month or so.
So, at the end of 2001, the future looks bright. We have had a number of successes this year, and will continue to work in increasing our membership and providing better service.
Larry
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