Mark Cleary and Andy Hecker of Southern California, two longtime masters athletes and USATF officials, are clashing over Mark’s insistence that Andy’s Southern California USATF Association masters championships have a “pre-entry process.” Andy has long advocated banning late fees for athletes who make the effort to show up at a meet. Following are Mark’s report on that USATF association and Andy’s follow-up.

Mark Cleary writes:
SCA MASTERS COMMITTEE REPORT
The first meet for the Masters schedule (John Ward Games) was conducted at Santa Ana College on April 10. I did not get an exact count, but the attendance seemed to be about average.
We lost the Saddleback Relays this year, which is usually the season opener, in March. We have also lost the Dan Aldrich meet at UC Irvine, which had been set for May 29. San Clemente High School is covering that loss by staging a meet on Saturday, May 28. They have a new, all-weather track that was completed just about two months ago.
We finally have a location for our Association championships, June 11 at Southwest L.A. College. I have instructed our chairman and meet director, Andrew Hecker, to institute a pre-entry process for the meet.
The Trojan Masters meet now has a date of July 10, at USC. We are pleased that we did not lose this meet opportunity this year. We were not sure this meet would happen this year, given all the construction at the USC campus facility.
Our West Regional Championships will be improved this year, with the addition of an announcer.
We’ve also added for the first time at the West Regional an exhibition event for amputee athletes and one event for wheelchair athletes. These invitational exhibition events will be coordinated by Richard Robert.
This meet will be held July 23-24, two weeks before the USATF Masters Outdoor Nationals in Hawaii. The World Championships will follow, Aug. 21 through Sept. 3, in San Sebastian, Spain.
There are plenty of great competition opportunities for Masters athletes this year.
We will be having our first online Masters meeting on April 20, beginning at 7 p.m.
Andy Hecker responds:
Some minor corrections and additions to Mark’s report, I guess you could call this the report from the Masters T&F Committee:
First, the location I am trying to procure for the SCA Masters T&F Championships meet is the brand new Mondo track at West LA College in Culver City (not the beat up Mondo track at Southwest near Inglewood).
We do not have a signed contract because the school is new to this kind of rental process. They are concerned they might not receive delivery of all their equipment (blocks, hurdles, pads etc.) as they are already late–I might be sending up an urgent request to borrow whatever is missing from any place nearby that can provide them.
There is also construction going on that affects 3 of our throwing events (West LA normally has one of the best issolated throwing facilities in the area — UCLA and USC train there), plus they think they might need security to guard our javelin landing area. I am guessing it will take me a couple of weeks to work through their issues and to put them on the right course as to the true size of our event.
While this meet is intended to be our Masters Championships, I want to invite all athletes to participate. Last year we had a sizable number of people making an additional attempt to set open qualifying marks for the Olympic Trials. Even the Youth Championships will be going on simultaneously, youth athletes are welcome as well (we frequently get a few who came with their parents). And this year the Disabled Athletes have been invited as well. If we are going to have a meet, the more the merrier.
The intended date for the meet is June 11th and I intend to keep the meet on the 2nd Saturday of June into the future. That is the ideal, traditional date for the meet and now that we have gotten the other meets that had procured that weekend to move to better dates, we should have no further conflict. I will get information out ASAP once I can sign a contract.
I will then post pre-entry information on Active.com (barring USATF coming up with an On-Line registration system for Association meets, not currently available) more for publicity purposes than anything else. I will, however, seriously activate the $5 penalty for EARLY registration because I seriously donot want pre-registrations to confuse my meet operations — as they did when doing the Western Regional Cross Country meet late last year.
While we did lose the Saddleback meet this year, they have indicated they intend to come back on line with us in the future. Doug Smith was the instigator of that meet (though not the meet director) and it is again Doug Smith who is the instigator of the new San Clemente meet (again though not the meet director). While the Memorial Day weekend will remain the weekend of the Dan Aldrich/Irvine meet, San Clemente will find another weekend to host their meet in the future.
In addition to the San Clemente meet that has come on line this year, we also have added the Santa Barbara Easter Relays Open meet with Masters division races and I made our first attempt to host an Indoor Championship meet. Unfortunately the indoor meet had to be held outdoors on the rainiest weekend of the year and much of it was flooded out.
HS/Open Meet Director and I decided to run whatever events we could, but sent home the officials and charged no entry fees. We did have the most dedicated of Masters athletes attend and later in the day we did get enough sunshine to complete all the running events. We also have a good supply of leftover Championship medals for future use. It will, however, take more arm twisting to get the The Easter Relays also had sparse Masters attendance, but I expect that will improve as more athletes learn it is going on.
The Trojan Masters meet has been consulting with me regularly over the last year, with the continuing question of what the construction situation will be at USC. They now expect to host it on July10th, but still do not have a contract from USC. As they announced the date, San Diego Association announced their Chuck McMahon meet had been moved to July 9th (from its traditional last weekend of June). SD Masters Chairman Kettrell Berry and I will consult behind the scenes on potential date changes before these situations arise again.
A summation of our schedule: We have lost two of our regular meets so far this year, both I hope will return. We have added three new meets to our calendar, two that have already happened and need to build, one still yet to happen. And one of our meets will happen a couple of months later than usual. Now how to increase attendance at these meets . . .