“Those “private enterprise” gals and guys are the ones who have been using USAT as a tool for personal/business growth.”
without taking sides, i’ll play devil’s advocate on this. you make your statement above in a context of this being a bad thing. what is wrong with private enterprise using USAT as a “tool for personal/business growth”? in the article i wrote, skip used this same analogy, but with a different emphasis. he said that he intends to provide private industry a “toolbox” and i think that’s an appropriate posture.
one might reasonably view USAT as an industry organization. what do you, as a member, want USAT to do? i think you want your federation to provide fair, safe, cheap, plentiful events, and to provide a stable environment for those events to continue year after year. you want the events to exhibit some sense of uniformity of rules and expectations when you arrive at the race scene. in the case of each of these elements, your federation is executing your wishes through the RD. in other words, the RD wants the same thing you want, he wants his races to be cheap, safe, fair, and so forth, and these commercial ventures look to USAT to provide them with the tools to make that happen.
the only thing USAT wants that is often at cross purposes with the RD is, USAT wants more races instead of fewer. competition is good, everyone agrees, except the recipient of competition.
so USAT’s rightful goal, one might argue, is to be a service organization for the RD, that is, any and every RD. he’s there to be “used” by the RD. when i go out to breakfast i’m simply “using” the restaurant for food. one might think that a base motive except, of course, that this is precisely what the restaurant intends for itself, to be “used” for food.
“Other than a mailing list, which can be purchased, what advantage does an NGB have in the marketplace.”
let us say i want to set up a rival federation. i’m going to host my own national championships, i’m going to host my own world championship qualifiers. when i announce this, how long do you think it’s going to take before i get a nasty letter from USAT’s attorney, with the law on USAT’s side?
when WTC decided to non-sanction with USAT, what is the first thing that happened? USAT went to the ITU and basically had IM china shut down. IM japan is very possibly the next. should active.com start offering insurance to triathlon organizers, USAT’s next step is to go to the USOC and have war declared on active.com, by asking the USOC to urge other sports to offer their own online registration services, and to set up such an engine for this.
this is a fairly evenly contested battle. and it should be. both sides need the other. but both sides ought to let the other have enough elbow room to make a decent living. the current fracas is over just where that line ought to be drawn.