Pro Sportsman Association Update - NHRA invites PSA to year end meetings

I’d like to give everyone some updates on the Pro Sportsman Association:

-We are finalizing our questionnaires for our members. We hope to get those emailed out this week. Our hope is that we can get our membership’s feedback into the decision makers at NHRA’s hands in time to address potential issues for 2013.

-We have been given the ‘green light’ to have a PSA representative speak at the year-end track operator meeting in Division 2, 3, 5 and 7. We have yet to hear from 4 and 6. Division 1 said they already have a tight schedule for their track operator meeting, but would welcome literature on behalf of the PSA. We feel this is a pretty big development and could go a long way to building a relationship between the PSA and tracks to better promote our brand of racing. One of the things we learned this year is we need to start working with the tracks months in advance of a race to build up promotions. We would hope we could get some tracks that may have dropped us off the fence, and potentially add the alcohol cars back to the schedule in the future, along with keep the tracks that we do have. We also hope to get a few tracks that may not be promoting the events as a ‘front gate’ draw to do so.

-While we have come up well short in our membership goals for 2012, we feel there is enough interest and support to move forward and continue in 2013. We have simply made too much progress to quit after one year. As we have reported earlier, we have directly caused a 150% increase in Top Alcohol media coverage. We are starting to build relationships with the NHRA, track operators and Division Directors. We feel with an offseason to talk with track operators and develop plans for 2013, we can achieve even better results next year in terms of promoting the Top Alcohol brand of racing.

-As of this writing we have 40 paid racer members. That’s roughly 60% of our stated goal of having 70 racer members. There are probably another 10 or more racers out there that have verbally said they would join, but for whatever reason have yet to join. We have fell well short of our goals of business/manufacturer memberships. We will look at restructuring our business memberships to provide more opportunities for businesses to become involved without buying in at the cost of a full membership. Hopefully a revised pricing structure will drive more volume. We also hope that approaching companies with a year under our belt this offseason will give them the confidence to invest in our cause.

-That said, we are just about broke. We have budgeted money for the handout cards for the Central and Western regions, but have still had problems getting images for all of our Central and West Coast membership. Luckily Todd Veney believes in what we are trying to accomplish and has agreed to finish the year working for the PSA despite no longer receiving payments from the PSA. There is still a great need for your support. Despite it being late in the year, your monetary support won’t come without a benefit. While we have not finalized membership pricing for next year, we will be giving 2012 members a $100 discount on their membership next year. Your monetary support gives us the means to better represent you and promote our brand of racing!

-We are still working to finalize a time and date, but we will be hosting a PSA membership meeting at the IMIS Show in Indianapolis, Dec. 6-8. We hope to get enough time for a brief open meeting of all team owners/manufacturers, for inquiries about becoming a PSA member, then host a membership-only meeting for 2012 members and 2013 pledged members. We hope to have NHRA representation at this meeting. We also plan to hold board elections at this meeting.

-We are a new organization, and what we are trying to accomplish is fairly unprecedented. We have made some tremendous progress in terms of media coverage, and are starting to make in-roads on cooperation with tracks and the NHRA. We hope to make some progress at getting a few more tracks on the schedule as we build on these relationships. No different than learning what your race car wants, we have also learned some things that didn’t work, or where we need to improve on. It’s safe to say that the 2013 PSA will be an improved model, and if we can build on this year, good things are in store for the alcohol classes.

-For those of you who have asked about access to forums on the PSA website, we just ran out of volunteer man-hours to really get that going. We focused the efforts we did have on keeping the PSA features updated on the page. Thanks to the efforts of David Smith and Steve Fuhrman, we have a great library of photos from the events he was able to attend. Just imagine what we could have if we had a budget to put David at every event.

-We thank each of our members for their support this year. We hope to get a few more before the year is out.

Feel free to email any of us on the PSA Board for comments or suggestions:
Will Hanna - will.hanna@insidetopalcohol.com
Marty Thacker – mlthacker@marathonpetroleum.com
Justin Jacobsen – jjacobsen@ace-mfg.com
Mark Billington – Mark.Billington@pepsico.com
Ray Drew – rdrew@wi.rr.com