David Lombardi, head of the Alumni Association, was able to give us an interview on the state of the Alumni Association. The full interview is available below:
What is the Alumni Association and who is eligible to join?
The UD Hockey Alumni Association, though yet not formally established, is a network of Delaware alumni that were members of the team/organization during their time as a student at the university. The Association is being established to develop and strengthen relationships of UD Men’s Hockey alumni and friends of alumni, develop and execute on strategies that support the long-term sustainability and financial health of the UD Men’s Hockey program, and to maintain a network of alumni and friends to offer and provide career advice and professional assistance to players and other members. Membership of the Association is open to all current or previously recognized University of Delaware Men’s Hockey team players and coaches.
What is the state of the Alumni Association? Is it growing?
The Association is still in its infancy so it can only grow at this point. Since Alumni Weekend this past February we have established our group of “founding fathers,” including Rich Roux ’82, Dan Demasi ’88, Aleks Volkov ’11, and myself. This group, in conjunction with Coach Romanella, has been meeting periodically to select and vote on the Board of Directors, draft and finalize the governing Bylaws, and procure the minimum funds required to establish an agency account and be formally recognized by the University. I expect by the end of March we will be prepared to come back to the school and request recognition and fund the account, at which point we will draft a newsletter to alumni to summarize activities and solicit donations/membership. As our membership base grows we will begin executing on our future projects and develop a longer-term action plan.
What do you have to do as head of the Alumni Association?
The Board of Directors currently consists of four Officers (President, Secretary, Treasurer and Vice President), one additional Director, and the Head Coach. As President, I serve as the Chief Executive Officer overseeing all initiatives, calling and facilitating our meetings, and advising on active projects and voting on proposals. The Secretary position is also vacant at the moment so I am filling that role in the interim until we nominate and vote on another alum to join the Board. Due to the fluid nature of the Association at this point, the Board members are really interchangeable and all five of us are taking on and performing a variety of roles and responsibilities.
Elaborate on what is going on with the golf outing.
The golf outing is actually on Friday, April 24th, just over five weeks away. The outing is something the team has been doing since before I was player. It began as an off-season fund raising event and is always scheduled on the same weekend as our player awards banquet to give family and friends of players one final opportunity to come to campus, gather with the current team and their families for some recognition and fun, and also to get some clarity and focus on goals and outlook for next season. When the original Booster Club was established in 2010, they took over control and planning for the outing and have been running with it since. We hope to continue this with the future Booster Club members and will look to establish a strong working relationship with them once the Association is operational so the alumni can support in any way possible.
What are some other events the Alumni Association will be doing in the near future?
Our primary mission at this stage is get established as a formal Association with the University. Once that is complete our first order of business will be communicating our presence to the existing alumni list and then leveraging the school’s contact information database to expand our reach and possibly get in touch with some long lost UD Hockey alumni. For later in 2015, we will be looking to move Alumni Weekend back to the first semester, where it hasn’t fallen since the 2009-10 season. Some other ideas we have kicked around are one or more informal golf outings over the Summer and also doing some regional gatherings for our alumni scattered around the northeast corridor. We are targeting New York City for our first gathering as we have a large presence there and it is centrally located for several others. We would then consider expanding to other cities with slightly fewer alumni such as Philadelphia, Washington, D.C, and even Boston.
By: Tyler Fitzpatrick
