I have a question. How do I go about re-upping my TD Certification.
I am starting a new chess club and will be needing to start running tournaments again.
In the last 11 years, I have been active helping out, but there were already two certified TD’s in the area. Therefore, I didn’t need to keep active in that manner. Of course I have helped in directing activities, so I am current on knowledge.
Ron, you may believe you are current on procedures and rules, but how does the USCF know that? If you haven’t officially directed in about 11 years, that’s 2 rulebooks ago, isn’t it?
Take the appropriate test, if you’re correct about your knowledge level it should be a snap. Larry Pond is the guy to contact at the office, he can check your former certification level.
Well Mike, if you would have checked my MSA you would have seen that I directed only 5 years ago. When I said 11 years ago I was being figurative…
Oh well, I have also helped in a national and state tourneys as well. Anyway, I am asking someone who actually might know how I can recertify. You apparently don’t know. Thanks anyway.
From the USCF brochure on TD certification dated 2005:
Doesn’t say anything about a gap between expiration and renewal, though it probably should. If you meet the requirement for your level, write to Larry Pond at the office. (Note that he may refer it to the TDCC if he’s not sure.) If you don’t, you have to take the test again.
Ron,
Ditto Mike’s and John’s advice; contact Larry Pond (lpond@uschess.org). I checked your MSA and it looks like you will need to take an exam. I suspect Larry will send you the appropriate exam via an e-mail attachment.
One idea for the future is that when you work at bigger tournaments get the chief TD or your section chief or floor chief to sign something regarding your TD experience at the event. You can use one section (no more) at one event as TD experience that counts the same as a stand alone tournament (so, being the chief at one 50 player section at a big event is the same as being a chief TD of a 50 player tournament). Because of past reporting and recording proceedures TDs often get overlooked for this kind of experience. The signed statement is a handy way to correct that and get the credit you deserve.
Good luck in the LaSalle-Peru area with your chess activities. I still have fond memories pushing my first pawn there.
Tim Just
TDCC chair
I recently went through the same problem. I got the club level Cert. I also noticed, that when I assisted at two tournaments now, there was a field on the USCF web site for entering assistent TD’s. So, we can get credit that way, too.
Edit. After posting the above, I went to my MSA. It shows I only assisted at just one tournament. Silly me! I had thought that Ben would have entered me in the last tournament, too. My lesson here, is that in the future, my assisting duties shall also include reminding the Chief TD to enter my name in the Tournament Submission Screen - and if possible to observe him doing so, too.
There has always been an empty blank in the rating report submission area of the TD/A which asks for "additional TDs" (presumably when all the TDs' names wont fit in the "Chief" and "Assistant Chief" fields). When I have a large event, I try to list all the TDs in this box if they're not listed anywhere else in the report. Yet this field which summarizes all the TDs of a tournament has never been listed in the tournament record on MSA. I assume this information is nevertheless useful, despite never being used?
MSA was written back in the days when the only TD information we got on rating report files was the section chief and section assistant chief. Yes, there was a place for the tournament chief TD and an ‘other assistants’ field on the printed form, but no place for that information in our computer records.
The tournament chief, tournament assistant chief and the other assistants fields were added to the tournament records in 2005 but not to MSA.
Thus MSA doesn’t know about the other assistants field at all and doesn’t show tournaments at which you served as the chief or assistant chief TD for the tournament but not for any specific section.
I look through some of the validation reports every week, not all chief TDs bother to fill in the ‘other assistants’ fields and it is quite common for the IDs they put in to be invalid or to be someone who is not a currently certified TD.
During validation we require that the tournament chief TD and the section chief TD be current certified TDs, we are not currently treating invalid IDs or non-certified TDs as errors in those other fields. Perhaps it’s time we started validating those fields and treating any invalid IDs or non-certified TDs as errors requiring correction before the event can be rated?
I like that idea. There is no need to put down a ‘helper’ in the rating report.
Yep, Larry’s the guy. And you’ll find him to be quite responsive, too. We just dealt with a similar issue for our club; we want to have two valid TDs so each of us can take turns playing and directing.
I’ve found all the Tournament direction/rating/records people at USCF to be both responsive and knowledgeable. The trick is getting to the right person from the get go.
Never email a general mailbox at USCF. Also, phone has been more effective than email when I want to get something resolved quickly. So use that toll-free number!
IMHO Larry is quite good at responding to email, but he is a part-time employee.
It is probably also ineffective (and more than a little rude) to email 10 or 20 people with uschess.org addresses in the hopes that one of them responds. (Such emails are more likely to get caught by our spam filters, too.)
Mike,
Where does e-mail to the general USCF mailbox go anyway? Just curious - is that what you are referring to being sent out to the 10-15 people like you describe? If so it seems like that ought to be changed. But I doubt that is what you are talking about.
I think all the ‘generic’ email addresses have someone assigned to cover them these days, usually by forwarding email to those addresses to someone at their usual address. (One of these days I’d like to see a system set up where email to ‘functional’ addresses, like 'ratings@uschess.org’, are dynamically forwarded based on who’s in and available at the time so that they get faster responses, rather than statically forwarded, but that’s a very low priority item.)
As I recall, uscf@uschess.org currently goes to Judy Misner.
There are people (they know who they are) who will shotgun email to every address on the masthead (relevant or not), including the entire Board. That’s more likely to get them universally ignored than to get an immediate response, if only because everyone assumes someone else will answer it.