Racquetball

Since the eighties, I’ve been driven to promoting the sport and athletes of racquetball – in equal parts of volunteer, charitable, hired, contracted and intellectual effort. It has been a consistent thread across decades of personal and professional achievement. Here’s a timeline and highlights:

I am so proud that my primary contribution to the sport – that of being the Managing Editor of RACQUETBALL Magazine for 20+ years – stands alone as unequaled.  That singular effort re-established and produced the sport’s flagship publication from 1989-2004 and in 2013-2016, resulting in a personal body of work that boasts 96 editions of the premiere and longest-running magazine of its type. My tenure is twice that of fellow National Racquetball editor and USAR Hall of Famer Chuck Leve – for whom I was honored to write and emcee remarks to induct him in 1997.

In my role as Editor-in-Chief of RACQUETBALL, I did far more than simply oversee magazine production. My hands-on approach included editing all content, coordinating the efforts of writers and advertisers, securing and selecting all graphics and images, then personally designing the final page layouts of every issue. I managed every phase of the book’s marketing, from setting annual editorial calendars and planning specialty segments, to negotiating ad contracts and approving press runs. Through 2004, the magazine was produced bimonthly, generating six issues per year with a 72-page count, in full color. In that period, the skills, abilities, dedication, and talent offered saved the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars in graphic design and production fees alone. In turn, the savings realized by those efficiencies freed up sizable budget resources to fund complementary promotional efforts for the sport and its governing body.

Hired full time and brought to the national office in 1990, I was the first and only woman to serve at the Associate Executive Director level where I provided marketing and creative direction far above and beyond the job title. Those skillsets further allowed the organization to develop and present a highly-polished brand over two decades at minimum cost.

In the mid-90s, I was driven to take on the self-study and professional development of Internet skills that were groundbreaking at the time. Embracing the “level playing field” of the medium, along with its unlimited potential, I sought to master the marketing opportunities of the web by working with member-professionals to shape and craft new ways to deliver information and further promote the sport online. I created the first AARA and IRF websites and populated them with the collective wealth of their historical archives, then quickly re-designed them and added a RACQUETBALL site to supplement the print magazine. Many other web properties were undertaken in the years that followed (LPRT, PARC, RFTC, CRA), and my impact upon the modern promotional era of the sport remains evident to this day.