The Change Process

During the past week several cheerleading rules changes were handed down, including by the NFHS, AACCA, and USASF. All of these changes led to numerous comments on Facebook, Twitter, and the Fierce Board about why specific changes were made, but the USASF changes led to several questions about how the changes were made.

The USASF publicized a Rules Change Process earlier in the season, but the recent changes didn’t follow the published procedures. These changes came directly from the USASF Board of Directors. In their defense, the Board of Directors has always reserved the right to do just about anything they wanted to, but I don’t recall another time in which that right has been exercised and have bypassed the National Advisory Board, Rules Committee, and industry staples such as Les Stella and Debbie Love.

The reason I bring this up is because I want everyone to take a look at the way these types of changes are made. Are we better off with the AACCA or NFHS model of making changes, in which relatively few people get input, but changes can be made much more quickly or are we better off with the published USASF method in which changes are made every couple of years after getting input from everyone that is willing to provide feedback? Is having a Board that can make changes outside of the published process a good idea so things can get done in case of emergency or a bad idea because that authority can be misused?

This all leads to the final questions.If you were designing the perfect process for making rules changes what would it be? What elements of AACCA, NFHS, and USASF’s process would you keep and which would you change?