We also had the opportunity to meet Jill Pilgrim and Toni Agard of the Legal Department, Catherine Sellers, Director of Development Programs, Mark Springer, Director of Grass Roots Program and Planning, Peter Mahoney, Director of High Performance Programs, and Mike Conley, Director of Elite Programs.

Mr. Masback took the time to give us an overview of USATF and their structure so we could better understand where we are within their structure and how we can better use their resource. Tiffany and Thomas also took the time to give them an overview of USADTF and where we are under the USADSF and CISS structure. USADTF is currently under the USATF Disability Group structure and we have expressed our strongest desire to break away from the Disability Group and create a Group of our own where we can directly link ourselves to USATF. For the past 3 years we have not seen any evidence of benefits in being under the Disability Group. The goals, purposes, interest, problems are too different between the Disability Group which represents strongly under the Paralympics and our group which represents under Deaflympics. This new proposed structure is currently under review by USATF and we feel positive that they will agree to the new structure.

Each of the people that participated in the meeting also gave an overview of what type of service they provide and different ideas on how USADTF could benefit from their programs. Below are the highlights of benefits that USADTF will work on to help our athletes and members. We need to utilize those resouces to tap Deaf athletes in mainstream systems.

CALENDAR OF EVENTS: USATF has a calendar of events booklet that they distribute every year and they have invited us to include our calendar of events into the booklet, this way we could probably attract deaf athletes that are in the mainstream programs. We are to submit our 2003 calendar of events by the next Annual meeting in November of 2002. This may prove to be a great way of publicize ourselves.

ASSOCIATION WORKSHOP: We have been invited to attend to the Association Workshop in August of 2002. This is a very important opportunity for us since we have been invited to speak to the audience about USADTF. There are 57 Associations in the USA and we are sure that a lot of deaf athletes from the mainstream may already be a member of one of the Associations. We also can seek help from the Association in identifying deaf athletes in their region.  

USATF Newsletter: We have been invited to put in an article on USADTF in their infamous USATF newsletter which goes out 3-4 times a year. They have about 40,000 subscribers and this taps into about 400,000 athletes! USADTF will work on putting out information in USATF newsletter on a regular basis. Again this is in hopes to tap into deaf athletes that are unknown to us.

ANNUAL CONFERENCE: USADTF has been attending the USATF Annual conference for the last 3 years and have found it to be very beneficial in terms of obtaining new information and increasing our networking opportunities. USATF has graciously allowed us to have our booth set up at the conference, and we are now planning hopefully to have our own time slot for our session. We are hoping to advertise and invite all deaf athletes, coaches, members to attend the Annual Conference and this site can become our USADTF annual meeting as well. This is a two fold bonus for us. First, this allows us to have a regular annual meeting every year, secondly, this allows our members to take advantage of information and network they have to offer at the USATF conference.

COACHING CERTIFICATION: USATF is encouraging us to use their resources for the Coaching Certification Education. We had hosted our first Coaching Certification in 1999 at Gallaudet University and that had proved to be successful. However we were not able to host another certification school thus far. Cathy Sellers is very supportive of us and we know that we will have support from her when we are able to set up another one. Cathy also will work with us to ensure that there are no costs involved in interpreting during the coaching school.

NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS: We have been invited to work with USATF in exploring opportunities to have our athletes participate in their National Championship events. One example is the upcoming National Cross Country Championships this coming fall of 2002. We have been invited to participate and we are now working with them to organize this event. This is a trial run to see if its successful and worthwhile to plan future ones. We are hoping that our long distance runners will be interested in participating, please look for more information on that shortly!

These highlights above are to name a few, there are more projects in the works right now and we look forward to work closely with USATF to help our athletes. We sincerely hope that you all will help support us in our efforts, the more people participating and volunteering, the better it looks for our organization!

A special Thank You goes to Thomas McLean for his effort to make the meeting a success with arranging the entire agenda with various people mentioned above.