Celebrating Failure

It's really hard to admit failure...even harder when it affects other people you care about.

So this past year I have been the president of the underwater hockey club team at UF. It's been tough. I took over the presidency without a strong grasp of everything that was expected of our team to do throughout the year and it's been a struggle managing to do what we have done.

We are required to do a number of things as a sport club to receive funding for the next year. The toughest part of this, by far, is fundraising and hosting a tournament. Fundraising would not have been a problem if we were able to host a tournament, but because of the O'Connell renovations, by January all the pools at UF had been booked for the rest of the year and we would have to book an outside pool to host the tournament which would greatly cut down on our profit margin. I continuously emailed back and forth and had meetings with people that were in charge of booking the pool and no one could help us. Even the weekend that was still open wasn't available to us because they wanted to keep the pool unreserved for student to free swim (there is not much of this happening in the Florida pool, by the way). So with hosting a tournament out of the question, our fundraising hopes quickly fell. We had to come to the conclusion that we wouldn't reach the top level for funding for next year and settle for the second highest with the knowledge that RecSports won't allocate us anywhere near the funding we were allocated this year.

So I now know that it is best to host a tournament in the fall semester when the pool is not booked anywhere near as often. That will allow us to meet fundraising goals (which will also be lower next year because of the lower amount of funding we will be allocated). We also have a better idea of the timing we need to use for outside fundraising and community service events for next year. Overall, our officers will be better prepared for next year.

This is my team at the Florida Invitational Tournament in Orlando!

This sucks. It sucks that our members will have to pay more out of pocket to attend tournaments and that we might have lower attendance at tournaments because of this. And yeah, it is kind of embarrassing that I wasn't able to get us to meet our fundraising goals, but the president before me failed his first year and was then able to recover so I have strong hopes for next year. In this situation I looked for the next best solution, which just happened to be the lower level of funding, but which will allow us to easily meet our goals next year. Sometimes things like this happen, and it did this time, so I've accepted it and I am looking forward to next year. I still hate risk and I still hate failing, even after taking this class.