Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Ultimate Coaches and Players Conference: Boston 2007

After a year's worth of initial planning, I am pleased to announce the first Ultimate Coaches and Players Conference(UCPC). This event will be held in Boston in January 2007, and the website is www.buda.org/ucpc. The sponsors for the event are BUDA and NUTC, so my thanks goes out to them. The website is a simple introduction to the event, but we will be adding content about the venue, presenters, proposals, etc. Tiina Booth and I are going to host the event and we are close to signing the permits for the location. We have begun contacting possible presenters from the wonderful crop of Ultimate coaches and players, and, additionally, we will be soliciting proposals for presentations shortly.

The UCPC is being planned as a one day event, and it will feature seminars, presentations, panel discussions, as well as the Ultimate Expo. The Ultimate Expo will be a Trade Show with Ultimate vendors, and a Recruiting Fair for college programs.

The plan is to have content that will appeal to a broad range of attendees. We hope that people involved in Ultimate from the middle school coach to the elite player will find topics that interest them.

So stay tuned for more info shortly. It should be an exciting event.

8 comments:

Paul said...

This sounds really interesting. Is there a possibility that you could record the presentations (either audio or video) and put them online afterwards for people who won't be able to make it in person?

gcooke said...
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gcooke said...

Paul,

That is a great suggestion. I will look into it.

Thanks, G

Seigs said...

Another idea:

You can also "hire" (i.e. give some free stuff to) a few rapporteurs who would write 1 page summaries of the presentations and post them on the conference website with teh help of a tech guy.

I was a rapporteur once--The system seemed to work well.

Anyway, the conference idea sounds like a a great one.

gapoole said...

An excellent idea, indeed. I'll definitely keep my schedule open, esp because I would love to be a rapporteur.

Out of curiosity, do you know anything about upcoming coaching certification programs? I'm interested in coaching high school at some point...

Gambler said...

Great idea, George!

Online summaries or videos would be especially useful to those of us who might not be able to make it from the west coast.

I'm sldo curious as to whether there will be sessions on general coaching skills not necessarily specific to ultimate. I feel that information on sports psychology and the like would be highly useful to coaches who are already familiar with many specific on-field strategies.

gcooke said...

Hi Gwen,

We are working on confirming presenters with general coaching/sports psych experience.

I agree that this type of info will be very useful.

-G

gcooke said...

LOA44,

Thanks for the comments.

I do audio support for conferences so I know the appeal of holding this type of event in nice places. Perhaps this will be an option down the road, but at this point we needed to keep it local and manageable. Also, we felt that in January, people will really want Ultimate as there is nothing going on.

We also decided to make the venue affordable as we have very little idea about how many attendees we might get. Certainly, we have discussed getting a venue in which demos could be taught, but that will come is susequent years...if the UCPC takes.

So we are trying to start small, but lay down a solid foundation if it is able to grow.

Thanks, G