My SafeSport certification expires next week. I am sitting in the waiting area of a dealership, waiting for warranty work on my car. Perfect time to take the refresher course…so I logged on to the SafeSport site, to find there are three refresher courses available. Course one is $9.99; course two appears to be free and course three is $12.99. All three allegedly take 30 minutes to complete.
Guidance on how to proceed? Thanks.
I can’t speak to the prices, but my understanding is that if you passed the Core course, you would take Refresher 1 a year later, Refresher 2 a year after that, and Refresher 3 a year after that. After that, I think you have to take the core course again and repeat the sequence.
SafeSport’s estimate for the amount of time it takes to do the core course was on the low side, I’d expect the same to be true of the refresher courses.
I’ll alert Melinda Matthews to the pricing question.
I assume the $9 figure mentioned last year includes the use of a coupon code. I looked up the code from last year, for the full course, and tried to apply that to refresher course 1. The code did not work.
I took refresher course one, paid $9.99, it took slightly less time than advertised, (25 minutes rather than 30) and now there is a nice green checkmark on the training course list in my account at SafeSport.
Let’s see how long it takes for this to be reflected at the US Chess site. Assuming I took the correct course.
It will get done a lot faster if you send the office a copy of your course completion certificate, otherwise the earliest it would show is early next week and I’ve been told it can take up to two weeks for staff to match up the SafeSport report with our TD records.
FWIW, our Executive Director says she took Refresher 1 recently and it isn’t showing on her CIVI-CRM record yet, so she got one of the reminder notices today.
Please specify who in “the office” should receive certificates. Things have not been the same since Joan left.
Well, you could send it to Melinda Matthews, the SafeSport Manager, mmatthews@uschess.org, or you could send it to the membership department, membership@uschess.org, or you could send it to the ratings department, ratingsmgr@uschess.org.
As a general strategy, I tend to prefer a support structure that uses ‘functional’ addresses over individual staff member email addresses, because that staff member might be unavailable for a variety of reasons (and people need to update their list of reliable ‘contacts’ to reflect changes in the staff), but making sure functional addresses are being covered without duplication of effort can be an issue, too.
https://new.uschess.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/us-chess-refresher-1-self-purchase-instructions.pdf is the site with instructions for the refresher. It includes the coupon code to reduce $9.99 to $9.00 during the purchase process.
I took the refresher yesterday (initial year expires this coming Sunday). I am doing a one-day tournament tomorrow and Tuesday I will check to see if things updated.
I’m in exactly the same boat now. I did send a copy to membership.
Thanks, Jeff. How is one expected to find that document by surfing the website? That’s the last 99 cents I waste on this.
A staff member recently mentioned to me that there may be an issue in how Refresher 1 courses are logged into CIVI-CRM. I’ve passed that along to Emanuel London, the IT Director. We sent out over 100 reminder notices earlier today, most of those will be individuals needing to take Refresher 1.
On the main page (in the bottom where you find the links) click on Safe Play Policy and then click on Safe Sport training on the next page. That will be the link I put above.
There seems to be a mismatch or lag between the dashboard (not sure what system that is) and the MSA display:
The validation program is supposed to access the latest CIVI-CRM SafeSport activity information, but I found a coding error in the function in the validation program that checks the CIVI-CRM database for someone’s current SafeSport status. I think I have it fixed, when I validate an event with your ID in it, it now shows your 2024 refresher course.
I’ve put the updated function into production, but am still testing it to make sure there aren’t other issues with how it accesses the CIVI-CRM API.
MSA gets updated once a week, ideally on Mondays, so it can lag behind what shows on the member dashboard and in a validation run.
Took the refresher on Thursday and does not yet show up on MSA (and neither does the other TD for the last tournament that passed last week).
There may be a bit of a delay this week. I suggest patience, and that is a reason for the 30 days grace period.
Another reason for the 30 day grace period is the fact that SafeSport will date your new certification from the date of the refresher course you take, so there’s a disincentive to taking it weeks ahead of when it expires.
Granted, but if you try for maximum duration by taking it four weeks after expiration then there is a fair chance that tournaments you do immediately after taking the refresher will have to wait a while to get rated (unless your name is removed from the tournament report while waiting for everything to go through). That delay would probably be shortened by getting the office involved to push through the correlation.
US Chess’s ‘end of the month’ policy for expiration dates is not common and is probably due to sending out a monthly magazine.
Someone who buys a 1 year membership with a monthly magazine should get 12 issues of that magazine, although there was a time when it was 13 months. I think Al Lawrence initiated the policy change to ensure that members got 12 issues and only 12 issues as a cost containment measure.
I know my SafeSport certification expires in early June and I will plan to take the refresher course in the week after it expires.
But Mike Ii don’t think you are doing much active directing these days. In that case you would not have event submission issues.
True, but knowing what SafeSport training is (and is not) was helpful from the standpoint of working on data issues for senior staff. It’s one thing to deal with a question from a TD about their SafeSport data, it’s different when it’s YOUR data that’s involved.
And unlike some of its harshest critics, I think I learned a few things during the SafeSport training. (But I also have been running sports discussion forums for over 30 years and I could find relevance from other sports in the SafeSport training, after which it wasn’t that big a leap of imagination to see how that was relevant in chess.)
I never really had a mentor as a starting TD, but I had a close friendship with Ira Lee Riddle for many years (we kept CJA alive for several years together) and I spent quite a few hours with Ira in the TD room at various events, as I did with Harry Sabine, and I’m sure I learned many things from them both.
I might direct again some day, if the right circumstances develop, I’m less likely to serve as the organizer of an event and I definitely don’t want to be both the organizer and the chief TD, the hours are just too long for me these days.