10/02/2024
Hello Everyone,
I have already made this announcement to our competitors at Championships this year and I want to elaborate and let everyone else in the NADAC Community know.
I will be stepping down from a leadership position in NADAC as well as Championships.
I am not selling NADAC, so to the vultures who are trying to pick up a business at a discount while I’m at rock bottom, sorry but you won’t be able to.
Championships this year was supposed to be a celebration of 30 years. And instead, it was a culmination of errors that I made that ended up turning this into one of the poorest planned events in the history of NADAC.
I am not stepping down because I feel a lack of support or because I don’t care about the NADAC community. It’s quite the opposite. I care quite a lot about all of you, and do not want you all to ever have to experience what you did this year, ever again. And I do not trust myself to not let that happen again.
I believe that there is something about me that needs some mental help.
There is a severe procrastination problem that for the most part as gone unchecked for many years because I was always able to make it work to my advantage in most situations, and no one was the wiser.
This year I arrived at the event healthy and ready to do all the things I would normally do during PreTrial to have the exhibitor bags ready and get the scoring pages, running orders and Gate software where it needed to be.
I then got sick with COVID and my brain ceased to function. I could not do things that I have been doing since I was a child.
And things just went down hill at a rapid pace.
I would like to say that all of the things that went wrong, should have been simple fixes. Our scoring program needed a very simple update to highlight the currently selected row in a different color, and I spent hours and couldn’t figure it out. I then fixed it within 10 minutes this morning.
I called a meeting of our stakes dogs to let them vote on how they should be judged on a scenario that we had not seen before, and I wanted the stakes dogs to make that decision because they are the ones who would be affected by it, and that felt like the right decision. That meeting never should have happened since the reason that situation has never happened before is because the entire run should have been an elimination. It is a very basic call that has been in the NADAC rule book for years. And I completely missed it and made a spectacle of something that any judge would have known the answer to. And that decision will haunt me forever because that decision not only changes the placements of the Super Stakes division for the overall winners, but it also undermined the years I have spent in trying to make the Stakes classes a consistent and even playing field, and I was so focused on not making the wrong decision from a bonus perspective that I completely overlooked a basic rule.
I didn’t have results pages ready. I didn’t have team dogs entered in the program. I didn’t have T-Shirts ready. I didn’t have bags ready.
None of this would have been an issue in most years, I would have stayed up a little late on a couple nights, gotten it done myself and no one would have been the wiser.
But this year exposed a glaring issue in how I run things, and that is that if I am not 100% healthy or I am not at 100% capacity mentally, the event will suffer in a monumental way.
Prior to the event there were decisions I had made that were incorrect. And I can’t blame those on being sick or tired. Those decisions were very simple, I prioritized people’s swag bag items over the actual core aspect of the event, running our dogs in Agility.
I decided to make the T-Shirts myself instead of ordering them because the year prior we had the shirts sponsored and I was so happy that we were able to give so much more money to our Junior Handlers. If I ordered them then it would have maxed out our budget for extra things like our JH sponsorship. And I really wanted to give our Junior Handlers that money to support them in coming to this event. But because of my procrastination I had to order things like the missing Leatherette tags, a few of the picture banners, and also the NATCH awards which ended up costing nearly double the normal amount because of next day shipping. And then we weren’t even able to give out those NATCH awards because I didn’t realize the Cam-Plex office was closed on Saturdays and the awards couldn’t be delivered. So, no one got their NATCH awards, and we went over budget with nothing to give our Juniors.
I spent roughly 100 hours making the engraved leatherette patches. I was told months earlier that it was too much manual labor and to do something else, I decided not to and if I had then I would have had time to work on the scoring programs and everything else.
I can go on, but I think at this point I’ve made it clear.
My last note is that had I listened to my close circle of event staff almost none of this would have happened.
I always told myself that if I ever got to the point where I couldn’t run NADAC or Championships that I would step down. I wouldn’t let others suffer from my lack of willingness to accept when I was no longer the best person to be in charge. And that day has come in a spectacular fashion.
I won’t be selling NADAC because this has been a family business since it’s inception and even with all the struggles we had this year you all treated my daughter in such an amazing way. And I won’t take the opportunity from her to be able to live a live with all of you in it. When she is 25 that is when a decision will be made, if she wants to take it over, it will be hers when she’s ready. If she doesn’t, then it will go to a group of people who best embody the venue and want to continue to see it grow. But she is 9 years old. So, you’ve got some waiting to do.
I will still work for NADAC and will give my opinion when it is asked for.
But I am relinquishing my ability to be the one who makes the final decision.
And if this worries anyone, I want to ease your concerns by saying this. I have not really been running NADAC in any sort of meaningful way for probably 3-4 years. I haven’t had a dog to run for many years, and that created a huge disconnection between me and the sport. So for many years I have taken the direction of Amanda and Jimmy and let them lead, and I only really overturned decisions when I felt it was a PR issue or something that I had experience with and felt it was a bad choice because we had done something similar in the past and I knew it would be a bad choice.
So this really won’t be much of a change. If you’ve enjoyed your regular NADAC experience on a weekend basis, nothing will change there. Championships will just become a better event. Nowhere to go but up.
As my final note I want to thank Amanda. She never wanted to run NADAC. But when I asked her in 2017 if she would do it with me, she said yes. And I couldn’t have done any of it without her.
I want to thank Jimmy. He was my friend before he ever became Amanda’s partner, and he is the only person I could have ever trusted to help me with this outside of Amanda.
I want to thank Jodi Dillard. I have put that woman through hell this year and had she walked out on day 1 I not only would have understood I would have supported it. But she stayed and she will forever have my gratitude.
I want to thank Cynthia Christie. I didn’t have the banners done, and I was so busy trying to keep the event running that she ended up just cutting everything herself so that you could all have those instead of receiving them later. She saved me from one less embarrassment. And she also somehow made me laugh when I was going through a mental breakdown.
I want to thank Mike Wolff. He did a great job in his assigned job. But he also did an amazing job on keeping a watchful eye on both Amanda and I when we were going through hell.
And I want to thank all of you. You all have been an integral part of my life since I was 4 years old, and all the best parts of me are because of all of you.
Sincerely.
Chris Nelson
