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August 2022 Board Meeting Minutes

August 17, 2022

Rochester Sports

Board of Directors Meeting

Wednesday, August 16th, 2022; 7:30am

Hyatt House

MINUTES

Present: Nelson, Tesch, Miksch, Gaskell, Groettum, Behrens, Muellner, McElroy, Davidson, Macken, Kauffman, Nance

Excused: Lester, Aagard, Wills, Cothern

Unexcused: Weiss, Kappes, Widman

Staff Present: Funk, Esau, Gibson, Curran

Guest: Ihrke, Kopet

  1. Call to order

Gaskell called the meeting to order at 7:34am.

  1. MCC Update: Monika Kopet
  • Works on sports sales with the Rochester Sports staff. Went to Connect in Detroit and is working close together with the Rochester Sports Staff. Just for Kix just signed for a multiple year contract. MN USA Folkstyle is working to sign a 3-year contract. They are also looking to bring their Greco event. MN Amateur gymnastics is a new event coming in 2023. MN USA Wrestling signed a five-year agreement - which used to be at RCTC.

  1. Approval of Minutes:

Motion to approve the June minutes was made by Macken, seconded by Miksch and passed.

  1. Financials
  • Behrens:
    • BS: $100,000 was transferred to ONB Bank to help diversify the funds.
    • General P&L: Q2 bonuses went out to staff. Fees and dues went up from Sports ETA Dues that pay out once a year. Sports Appreciation Social – half has been paid out to the Honkers for the July board meeting. Sales Convention line item increased from Connect Sports conferences staff attended.
    • Ihrke asked why the city funding is off by $25,000  - Matt mentioned we are missing the $25,000 which was added for sales incentives.
    • Event P&L:  Airfare National Chair – from the NJCAA basketball national office staff flying in.
    • Ihrke: asked how/why revenue is up from events. Matt mentioned some of it is from rebates. We still have to pay venue fees, etc. We also made a lot of money on the Kokoro events from the gate fee.

Motion to pass the June financials was made by Kauffman, seconded by Macken and passed.

  1. Event and Organization Report:
    • Eric: helping with the 10,000 senior softball event this weekend. Last week Eric and Jessica went to Connect Marketplace in Detroit – had 30+ appointments with event owners and feel there are a lot of good potential new opportunities to work on.
    • Linsy: Working on getting things ready for the 2023 volleyball season. Registration opens on October 1st. We heard from RT with Kokoro they will no longer be hosting Presidents Day or Midwest Fiesta in Rochester which is very unfortunate. This is due to court numbers being high in the cities and teams’ preference to not stay in hotels. Big City Luau will still stay and we will revisit the other events for 2024.
    • Curran: Hosted a number of baseball tournaments in July and August. Eric ran MBT weekend I and Kaleigh ran weekend II. Upcoming – we are hosting a new swim event in October. It’s a smaller one-day event but it is collegiate level. Hockey season is coming up – we have 8 tournaments starting October - and we are working on their hotel hockey sponsorship for those events. Will also be taking the lead on NJCAA Volleyball in November.

  1. Old Business:
    • Public Relations Committee: Brandon wrote a great article on the busy baseball summer which went out last month. We are looking to write an article on how we have come back to “normal” after the slump from Covid. We hosted the Sports Night during RochesterFest which was slower than years past but still a good night.
    • Foundation Report: Meet with the RCTC leadership to discuss operations of the stadium/bubble. Discussed the Sports Banquet Auction. The Sales Tax extension for a new sports facility did not move forward to the State Legislator this year – it does not expire until 2023 which gives the Foundation more time to work on.
    • Sports Banquet: Will be back at the event center again. We have an offer out to a speaker and will hear back soon. The auction is going back to pen and paper and will not be online.

  1. New Business
    • Jan-June year in review reports: We looked at year over year numbers from 2019-2022 to see how things have changes and evolved pre and post covid. We looked at the metrics that the city asks us to report. Look at 2019 compared to 2022 - the numbers are very similar which is nice to see especially considering we lost a lot of the big wrestling events that were host in 2019 – numbers are actually sitting higher.

  1. Adjournment- A motion to adjourn the meeting was made by Behrens, seconded by Kauffman and passed. Gaskell adjourned the meeting at 8:38am.