EUPA Apology: Summer League 7v7 Gender Ratios

Hello EUPA Community;

This is your President, Mika Uusnakki, writing to all of you about the recent Gender Ratio change to our Thursday Summer 7v7 League. I want to assure you that we have collected every piece of feedback you have sent and reflected on it under the guidance of our brand new Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee. We recognized that we hastily and ineffectively communicated to our community and failed to exercise due diligence in making a sound decision. I apologize to each and every single person for this failure and in particular to our female identifying community members who felt impacted.

We have identified three key failures that lead to this.

• We failed to challenge the narrative that we were going to effectively lose the Thursday league if recruitment pressure was not immediately taken off of the captains.

• We failed to include the DEI committee that - hours earlier - we officially approved as part of the board’s three strategic foci (Youth, New Player Experience, and DEI).

• Our implementation and communication conveyed that we do not value our female-identifying members. This does not align with our values, mission, and goals. Ultimate has long endeavored to be inclusive, diverse, and equitable, and we failed you in this regard. This was never our intention and we hope that you can forgive us as we strive to do better in the future.

Based on the feedback received, the Board of Directors voted to revert the Gender Ratio for our Thursday Summer 7v7 League back to 4:3 (or 3:4) as default. Going forward, we will be making the following changes to ensure this does not happen in the future:

1. Integrate DEI Committee into decision making, communication, and marketing processes

2. Stricter requirements on proposals and decision making at board meetings

3. Additional support for Summer Captains from DEI and Programming committees

For captains whose teams are still at risk of folding, please utilize the EUPA Community Slack, come recruit in-person to Winter Leagues, fill out the Teams Looking For Players Form, or reach out to admin@eupa.ca and we’ll do our best to help out.

We are grateful to have a community that is willing to correct us when we take missteps. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, wish to know more details about this incident, or wish to help out please don’t hesitate to send me an email (president@eupa.ca) or ask me in person.

See you on the field,

Mika Uusnakki, President

Edmonton Ultimate Players Association