Good Governance and the Importance of Meeting Minutes

Meeting Minutes are one of the few windows to the inner workings and decisions made by the USA Team Handball Board of Directors. A “window” because they sometimes don’t provide enough context to fully understand what’s being discussed or decided. They’re not perfect, but they’re better than nothing and reviewing them can give one a better sense of what’s going on.

Making them readily available for everyone to read is certainly “good governance” and USA Team Handball’s By-Laws, Section 16.1 lists multiple requirements for meeting minutes including this sentence: “Every reasonable effort will be made to publish the minutes within fifteen (15) days of approval by the Board.“

Needless to say USA Team Handball has historically very rarely met this guideline. If you been around awhile, you’re probably not shocked by this. And, there can be multiple reasons for this to include short staffing and problems with the website. But, if you think those are the only reasons and that USA Team Handball would never delay the posting of meeting minutes to delay the exposure of what might be considered a convoluted sequence of events… you just might be a little naive.

For the past several months USA Team Handball’s Meeting Minutes webpage section hasn’t been updated. The last listed minutes go all the way back to March 7th. That’s over seven months and the board has met multiple times and made multiple decisions. And, since the 15 May meeting the practice of announcing upcoming meetings and making the open session available for anyone to view online as part of a Zoom webinar has been discontinued. Perhaps that had something to do with former Board President Mike Wall’s resignation on 5 June. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence.

A Window of Transparency Opens…

Anyway… On Wednesday, 23 October, as I periodically do, I checked the USA Team Handball website to see if any new Board of Directors Meeting Minutes webpage had been added. Usually, this is a fruitless check, but, lo and behold it had been updated. “Finally,” I said to myself, “A little smidgen of transparency for this organization.” I immediately downloaded all the newly posted meeting minutes and started to try and piece together what in the hell exactly had happened the past few months. Not an easy task and after a couple of hours sorting through the documents and with a two day trip to California to attend the San Francisco Cal Heat Youth Cup to get ready for I had to pause my efforts.

…And Closes

But, I thought it would be nice to let everyone else know that these meeting minutes were now available so I prepared some social media posts to get the word out. A seemingly simple task, but it takes a bit of time to pull up Facebook, Twiter and Instagram, find a suitable picture, and craft a few bullet points. I did that and then went back to the USA Team Handball website for the meeting minutes link… only to find the meeting minutes had disappeared for some reason.

I suppose there could be a number of reason as to why such a window opens and then closes. I’ll leave it to everyone to speculate further. But, any excuses as to logistical reasons for not posting minutes due to time constraints… well, those excuses are pretty silly.

USA Team Handball Board of Directors Meeting Minutes (May – September 2024)

So, if USA Team Handball isn’t going to post Board of Director Meeting Minutes, I guess I will. (Good thing, I downloaded)

• 16 May 2024: Link
• 15 June 2024: Link
• 2 July 2024: Link
• 10 July 2024: Link (Removed per USA Team Handball’s request)
• 15 July 2024: Link
• 6 August 2024: Link (Removed per USA Team Handball’s request)
• 27 August 2024: Link (Removed per USA Team Handball’s request)
• 10 September 2024: Link (Removed per USA Team Handball’s request)