"We don’t get to the Olympic space if we don’t have the youth space, right?”
My interview with U.S. Figure Skating's new CEO
Last Friday, my profile of new U.S. Figure Skating CEO Tracy Marek went live on BU Today, the news home of our shared alma mater, Boston University. I will warn you that it is very BU-specific. We talk about the schools within BU she attended, her Capstone project (which is a sophomore-year project that everyone in her specific program has to do,) and the school newspaper. Skating fans will get some out of it, but it’s really meant for the school’s alumni.
We spoke for nearly an hour, and my first draft was closer to 2,000 words than the 1,200 it was originally intended to be. A lot got cut.
After you read the BU Today piece, come back here and read some interesting notes that were left out that will be of interest to non-BU affiliates.
She will be examining the fan experience, because that’s always what she’s done. Marek and her team in her previous job with the Cleveland Cavaliers left no part of the fan experience unquestioned. “I come from a background where every detail matters…(At the Cavs) we would care about how hard it was or how easy it was to get to the arena from work. Like, we'd literally would leave work at 5:00pm on occasion, drive home, pretend we were making dinner, and then drive back to work just to see what it would be like for fan to do the same thing after they left their jobs to get into the game. So, you know, every detail matters.” Marek went to the World Championships in Japan last week eager to see how the country nurtures their intense skating fandom. "I hear that the Japanese skating community is extra passionate, so I'm eager to see what they do. Maybe we can build our own ideas off that."
As I explain in the story, thanks to her time with the Cavaliers, she is not risk-adverse. But her trip via boat to Antarctica was one of the few things that caused her to pause. “I had watched a lot of videos before the trip. The waterway at the base of South America called the Drake Passage and it's supposedly one of the most treacherous waterways in the world because it's where the Pacific and the Atlantic meet. So I had actually gone to my doctor, and said, ‘I'm not an anxious person, but this might be the thing that sends me off the deep end.’ They gave me anti-anxiety medicine just in case, but I never took it…You'd hit these three story swells and I'm up on the front deck and I'm just like, ‘Yeah, this is awesome!’ I was loving it.”
She cannot figure skate, but she’s changing that. “To be honest, I'm not a figure skater. I am actually going to take our Learn to Skate USA program, the adult program, and they're gonna teach me how to skate. (Our organization includes elite athletes) but it also includes people like me who's just think, ‘Yeah, I think I'd like to give that a try and see how it is.’ I love the fact that the sport is so focused on just the passion and the interest and the engagement at all levels. If you're a person that want a person that wants to get into the competitive space at any age, there's a form for you. If you're a person like me who just wants to have fun when they put the outdoor ice rink out during the holidays, there's gonna be a place for me.”
I asked her how much of her day was spent on the Olympic-side of the house and how much on the rest of U.S. Figure Skating’s operations. Most media members and some fans are unaware that most of an Olympic-sports’ organization’s daily work has nothing to do with their Olympians, and I wanted to hear that in her words. It’s easy for us on the outside to judge the organization on how the elite athletes are marketed, but truthfully, they are measuring their success completely differently. “We have one team that deals with high performance athletes (elite skaters) that goes the whole way through, through the Olympics, but we have a whole another team that it literally about helping local ranks figure out how to set up a good Learn-to-Skate program and how to financially make the whole thing work. So it is not all about the Olympics.”