An Open Letter to USA Badminton Members – April 5, 2004:

I would like to begin by thanking you for the opportunity to serve USA Badminton (USAB) as your Director at Large and as your association President.

I take my responsibility to serve the USAB membership across our great country as a USAB Board member and officer seriously. With the limited resources available to our organization, the volunteer Board with members from all over the United States under my leadership had to make some difficult decisions over the past few years. The Board is doing its best to promote badminton across the United States, but we can be more effective only when opportunities to access additional resources present themselves.

Sometimes the Board’s effort bears result, like our continuing partnership with the Warren Company, which continues to work on getting badminton into the elementary schools in Texas, New York, and Connecticut. Other times we are disappointed, such as the cancellation of the Pompano Beach (Florida) training facility project when our development partner ran into insurmountable local political opposition to their development project. The Board continues to seek out new opportunities to make more badminton training facilities available across the country while being fiscally responsible.

The Board took a great opportunity to partner with the Orange County Badminton Club and K&D Graphics, which made a lot of private sponsorship resource available for training many USA Badminton athletes for many years. Without this opportunity, the Board would have had to settle at best for a small National Training Center program at the remote Lake Placid Olympic Training Center with a single coach after we lost the bed spaces at the Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center due to competition with other more popular Olympic sports. Unfortunately, the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center is not a suitable facility for our top athletes, who need jobs and easy access to colleges and universities while training. With the termination of the OCBC/K&D Graphics corporate sponsorship, the Board is moving on to seek out other opportunities. In the meantime, the Board has decided to try a new approach in funding the top US badminton athletes by holding a National Training Fund trial since many other National Governing Bodies also do not operate a National Training Center program.

An important part of the Board’s effort to promote badminton in the United States is to enlist the assistance of international badminton organizations. Through the hard work of Director Paisan Rangsikitpho, Director Cliff Peters, and other volunteers, USAB was able to attract the Pan American Badminton Confederation office to be located at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, California instead of in another Pan American country. USAB worked with the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim and the Los Angeles Sports Council to successfully bid for the 2005 World Badminton Championships. This will be the first time that the World Badminton Championships will take place in the United States. The International Badminton Federation (IBF) realizes the importance of trying to raise the American public's interest in badminton. IBF and USAB officials lobbied the NBC television network successfully so that NBC is promising to give badminton the same kind of substantial exposure that the sport of curling received at the last winter Olympics. All these media opportunities over the next two years will definitely help to increase the popularity of badminton throughout this country.

USAB continues to have a good working relationship with its USOC Sports Partnership team headed by Mr. Kelly Skinner. Under the Board’s direction, Executive Director Dan Cloppas and Peggy Savosik have worked hard to make sure that all funds are properly spent and accounted for, as evident by our problem-free USOC audits for the past several years. USAB continues to work closely with the USOC to ensure that our governance and procedures comply fully with the USOC Constitution and Bylaws. USAB has volunteered to be the first USOC National Governing Body to move its web site to a new central web site operation run by the USOC and is currently in the transition process.

Despite the diminished resource available to USAB since the 2000 Olympic games and intensifying international competitions, USAB is in the final stage of qualifying the men’s doubles team of Kevin Han and Howard Bach for the 2004 Olympic games. Other National Governing Bodies are not as fortunate since the United States has already failed to qualify any US athletes for many Olympic competitions. The USAB 2004 Thomas Cup team made it to the final stage competition for the first time in recent history*. I have made it a top priority for USAB to support our top athletes and will continue to do so as long as I am involved with USAB.

I would like to conclude by asking for your vote in the upcoming USAB Board election if you would like me to continue to volunteer my service as your USAB Director at Large. Please also vote for the following candidates who have volunteered their valuable time to work very hard to nurture and move our organization forward: Dudley Chen – Director at Large, Jack Harvey – Region 4 Director, and Cliff Peters – Region 5 Director.

Thank you for your time!


Best regards,

Don Chew
1432 N. Main Street
Orange, CA 92867
714-639-8900
email: Don@kdgpp.com

* Note: The US Thomas Cup teams made it to the "final stage" in 1949 and 1955, and to the actual challenge round in 1952, alhough the Thomas Cup competition format has changed over the years. Thank you to Al & Ginny Hales for this clarification.