Our guest is Phil Andrews, CEO of USA Fencing. Phil joins USA Fencing after nearly a decade of service at USA Weightlifting, and he joins First to 15 to discuss his journey to USA Fencing, where he hopes to see the fencing movement go over the next several years and what kind of CEO he plans to be.
In this episode of First to 15, we're joined by Phil Andrews, CEO of USA Fencing.
Listen for a frank and entertaining conversation about Phil's time as an ice hockey player, what he's most proud of from his time as CEO of USA Weightlifting, his commitment to transparency at USA Fencing and much more.
First to 15: The Official Podcast of USA Fencing
Host: Bryan Wendell
Cover art: Manna Creations
Theme music: Brian Sanyshyn
EPISODE 10
[INTRO]
[00:00:01] BW: Hello, and welcome to First to 15, the official podcast of USA Fencing. I'm your host, Bryan Wendell, and in this show you're going to hear from some of the most inspiring, interesting, and insanely talented people in the sport we all love. First to 15 is for anyone in the fencing community and even for those just checking out fencing to see what it's all about. So whether you're an Olympian or a Paralympian, a newcomer, a seasoned veteran, a fencing parent, a fan, or anyone else in this wonderful community, this podcast is for you. With that, let's get to today's episode. Enjoy.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:40] BW: All right. We’re joined today by an extra special guest, Phil Andrews, who as of August 16th, is the CEO of USA Fencing. Phil joins USA Fencing after nearly a decade of service at USA Weightlifting, including more than six years as CEO. He also served in an interim leadership role with the International Weightlifting Federation, where he did some heavy lifting for the IWF during an especially tumultuous period.
So today, we're going to ask Phil about his journey to USA Fencing, as well as where he hopes to see the fencing movement go over the next several years, and even what kind of CEO he plans to be. So let's welcome Phil Andrews, both as our CEO and as our guest on First to 15. Welcome to the podcast, Phil.
[00:01:20] PA: Thanks, Bryan. How are you today?
[00:01:22] BW: Doing well. Yeah. I'm excited to chat with you, and I know our listeners are as well. I know you grew up in England. So one might assume that you played soccer or cricket, but I was interested to find out that you found success in a maybe we could call it a nontraditional British sport. So can you tell us about that and your overall relationship with sports when you were growing up?
[00:01:44] PA: Well, first of all, us British people like to think we invented every sport that we lay claim to the sport of ice hockey, which was my sport, in a way which originates from the sport of Bandy, which was invented on a frozen lake in Cambridgeshire. So the Canadians, and I also hold Canadian nationality, so I guess I'll claim that one too, had claimed that they invented a sport of ice hockey in Quebec. But the Brits claim we invented it in Cambridgeshire. You can believe who you want, but I was indeed an ice hockey player. I also did shooting and rugby.
The claim to fame, I guess, for GB Ice Hockey is we're the only nation ever to win the Triple Crown, which is the World Championships, the European Championships, and the Olympic Games. It was in 1936, and the majority of that team were, in fact, Canadian. But still –
[00:02:36] BW: It’s just details.
[00:02:37] PA: Right. It happened. Because no one has done it again, and it's impossible to do at the moment, we all are the defending and reigning champions.
[00:02:47] BW: So what was it about sports, just in general, that has connected with you for so long?
[00:02:53] PA: I think sport has – It brings people together in a way that few other things do. Perhaps only religion has such a reach that sport does. Of course, those two things are very different. But I think sport is something that unites, and the Olympic Games perhaps embodies this through the lives of everybody worldwide from different cultures.
So I think that's probably what draws me to it is it's common theme through the world and the ability to an extent to drive change through sport, both in people's individual lives and in culture, is something that resonates very well with me. Frankly, it's interesting. It's what's interesting. Sport is fun. That's what it's supposed to be. Sport is supposed to be quite a fun thing to do, and I like facilitating people having some fun.
[00:03:42] BW: So that kind of actually is a good segue to my next question, which was why and when you moved from being an athlete, purely to kind of into the operational side of sports and helping spread that fun that you're talking about.
[00:03:57] PA: I've always been a doer. So I found in my first, I’m using quotation marks, business, when I was 14. I was in music. Really, what I wanted to do was get backstage passes and free merchandise, and I did quite a lot of that. It was designed to be a part of that music industry. So when I sort of moved into being interested in sports or rather been interested in more than just the playing side, that I think it was almost natural for me to see beyond and want to get involved in the administration side.
How I started was in ice hockey. I was involved heavily in the collegiate side of ice hockey in the UK. I was on the board of what at that time was a British university’s ice hockey association. I helped found a lot of teams that still exist in the UK. At one point, the NHL was locked out. So I literally wrote to a charity who was bringing over some NHL players and are lockout. I said, “Hey, would you like to play the Sheffield University Bears?” I think they thought we were an NCAA D-I team. We weren't. Some guys just started playing six weeks ago.
To my surprise and perhaps alarm, they said yes. That's how I ended up getting started in my sport career, and I think sort of naturally my personality leans into getting more involved than the surface level usually shows.
[00:05:24] BW: Yeah. That journey, like we said at the top, led you to USA weightlifting, and you were serving the organization, its members there for nearly a decade. We should say, under your guidance and you and your team, memberships, sponsorships event, participation all increased. Then like USA Fencing, which had a good Tokyo Games, USA Weightlifting did as well. That included the first ever Olympic silver in women's weightlifting. All that success that I just mentioned, what was kind of your proudest achievement while you were there?
[00:05:57] PA: There's a lot there. I usually look to something called the American Open Series, when weightlifting used to have just the national championships, I say just, the national championships at different age groups and then something called the American Open. It's quite a high level.
So when you walked into a gym, there wasn't necessarily a way that you could achieve something off the bat. So the American Open Series created almost a festival atmosphere of weightlifting, which provided one. When you walked into a gym, whether you were 5, 55, or 75, you have somewhere to go because in weightlifting, what is called veterans in fencing is called masters. So we had youth. We had senior or open and masters all in one competition, all of whom were competing on the same platform one after another.
So you would literally have three generations of the same family show up and compete together, which is always awesome to see, and it created that stepping stone between learning that weightlifting existed and going to the national championship event. I think in terms of lasting things that I can point to in weightlifting, that I have direct influence over, that's probably high up the list. Certainly, those have provided some very interesting and well-thought-of events in that community and twice have been the largest strength sports events in the world ever in Las Vegas in 2018 and in Columbus, Ohio, a familiar city for fencers, in March of this year. Yeah. Very much like that.
Both things off the field of play, I was very proud of. Our independent ethics process, for example, or Athlete Wellness Program, which provided mental health support for any individual in our membership. Two of those highlights, perhaps. The American Open Series is something where if you've gone to a national event in the sport of weightlifting, the likelihood is that you've shown up in American Open Series over time.
Another thing I found was great, and this happens in fencing too, is you could see an Olympian. You mentioned the silver medal in Tokyo. It was Kate Vibert or Kate Nye. You could see a Kate in an American Open Series, alongside somebody who's been lifting for three or four months. They could stay and theoretically say, “Look, I was competing against an Olympic medalist.” I might have placed fourth, and that Olympic medalist won that competition. But I was still competing against him. I think it's really cool for a young kid to say, who's able to look up to someone like a Kate or a master who's just started the sport at 42 or 43. You can go in and say, “Yeah. I actually competed right up against an Olympian.”
[00:08:42] BW: You referenced some of those similarities between fencing and weightlifting. Obviously, different sports in a ton of different ways, but there are a lot of similarities. So is there something, some sort of initiative or effort from your time there that you feel like could be pretty easily applied to USA Fencing to kind of support what we're trying to do here and help us grow up?
[00:09:03] PA: Yeah. I think there's some lessons learned, and we're about to look at the way that we structure events and how we can make more of local events. I think that's something we might have done very well at weightlifting. We had over 600 local events for a year, and I hope I can contribute well to that. I'm certainly not reclaimed to be an expert on fencing events, at least not yet. So I'm interested to get my hands dirty and involved in that process, along with all the committee and, obviously, Glen Hollingsworth in our team and others from around our community.
I think the other areas are off the field of play. There's lots of similarities between the structure of the national governing bodies, between some of the challenges that we're facing in the way that we interact with our membership, in the way that we grow the sport of fencing, in the way that our government is structured, in the way some of our policy is aerated and carried out. So I think there's a lot of things we can bring from weightlifting or at least learn from weightlifting and what we did there.
I'm not saying that weightlifting, of course, is as perfect as NGB. But I think we did a lot of good things there, and it appears that some people in fencing think so. So I'm sitting here today. But fencing has also got some good bones as a national governing body. I believe that I've joined an NGB, which has got a pretty good basis to it and needs some additional programs and some additional improvements, but not necessarily a complete tear down and restart.
I think that will be fair. I think that we can learn, again, some things we did at weightlifting, which proved really useful for the organization and particularly for its community and building that community and things that we can use here in fencing.
[00:10:45] BW: Before we get into that a little bit more, I found it interesting in talking with you that your relationship to the sport of fencing actually goes back much farther than when you started interviewing for the position, let's say. So can you tell us about some of those ways that fencing maybe surprisingly has cropped up in your life?
[00:11:02] PA: Fencing has been odd, it has had an on and off. Fencing is coming in out of my life in a way that perhaps no other sport has. So as I shared with you, Bryan, before we had this podcast. One thing which surprised us all was my wife has a distant cousin, John, and I guess therefore, Paul Friedberg, up in Mercer County, New Jersey, who were Olympians in 1992. I'm now related to them by marriage. So I guess I have an interest and conflict of interest to declare that my cousin is a club owner and coach.
Also, David Sage, who's up in Boston, David coached at the high school that I attended for some good A levels, which is what you do between 16 and 18 in Britain. So I cannot 100% prove this, but I'm fairly sure that David has actually coached me in fencing because I did briefly try fencing there. Plus, Mark was a national level fencer in USFA, as it was back then. He and I worked together at the University of East London. University of East London hosted the Olympic and Paralympic Training Center for team USA during the London Games. Mark and I worked together there.
In the run up to that, we actually filmed the video where Mark fenced me and, I have to say, kicked my butt. But Mark is well connected still with some of his former teammates, people like Rob Charlton and then Tim Morehouse, for example, who were former teammates of Mark, and he was rather excited to hear that I was joining fencing. But, yeah, I've tried fencing a few times in my youth, not just with the examples I've mentioned but previous to that, too. It has been an interesting sport that has cropped up time again in my life in some very odd ways that I just shared.
By the way, David Sage and I are from the same fairly small town in a place called Essex. So we're both from the Chelmsford area of Essex, England. Rather deliberately introduced us during the Summer Nationals, where at which point we realized it’s a smaller world than we thought. So, yes, I think the theme of my first few days and weeks of uncovering some of these stories might be it's a small world after all but –
[00:13:26] BW: Yeah, seriously. I love hearing about those types of connections, and it's all through the sport, right? The ways that people are connected and how large but also tight-knit of a fencing community we have. Phil, you mentioned Summer Nationals, which was in Minneapolis in July. So this would have been actually before you were officially “on the job.” But you were there on the ground, and that impressed a lot of people I know that I've talked to.
So why, speaking specifically about this event, did you want to be there? Then maybe talking more generally, why is that FaceTime so important to you?
[00:14:01] PA: So I think we've reached agreement with the board on the first of July, and it was actually announced later that day, ahead of Summer Nationals beginning on the second. One of the things I talked about in the – I think it was about two, maybe a little bit more than that, weeks of negotiations I had with David [inaudible 00:14:17], our chair, and others on the board was, honestly, I need to be at Summer Nationals.
One, it's the festival of fencing in this country. But it's also the Super Bowl of fencing in this country. So I think it's really important to show up at the Summer Nationals and just say hello to people, staff, board members, committee members, but also everyday regular coaches and, of course, athletes. I think it's just important to get to know the community. That is a phrase I really like, where it's not my job to tell you what to think. But it's my job to think about what you tell me, which is entirely a stolen quote, but I really like it, and I think it relates well to the CEO of the membership organization, and the biggest job that you have is to listen.
I think NGB speak most to their members, and therefore listen most from them members at national events. That's where you see and feel and hear the sport. It’s where you see, hear, and feel the organization. So I went there on my own dime to really spend two, three days talking, listening, meeting a few people. I didn't meet as many people as I might have perhaps liked. Certainly, I'm going to be in Minneapolis at the next NAC. I'm also just about to head out on somewhat of a club tour over the next few weeks, starting in San Francisco in just over a week's time from when we record this.
Then I'll be also visiting clubs in the San Diego, LA area and New York, New Jersey, and then eventually, Ohio, Boston, Atlanta, Houston. I think I might have missed one metro area. Of course, I visited one or two here in Colorado, which are close to our home office and close to my home in Southern Denver. But I think it's really important to go and have those conversations and talk to our members, talk to people, not just our national team and our national coaches, but down into the everyday club.
Clubs in fencing come in every shape and size. People who've got 40 staff, down to people who have got under 10 members and coach in a borrowed space with one or two strips of an evening. Those are both equally our members on both equally have needs, sometimes different needs that we need to be aware of and be able to use those experiences to both grasp, but also improve the services that we offer to fencing members.
In terms of why did I go to Minneapolis, that was it. It was meeting people, listening, seeing people. It was interesting to see a few people there who had some affiliation through either a friend or themselves in a sport of weightlifting, now something I didn't expect but was useful in a way to sort of aid some conversations and get introduced to even more people. Yeah, it was useful. It got me a head start. So by the time I showed up in August, I already knew one or two people and had some conversations that went on after Summer Nationals, got on Zoom with a number of people. Obviously, starting with board members are easily accessible for somebody who already had discussions with them.
But also, some of those people I met at Summer Nationals. I was able to spend an hour or two with them between Summer Nationals and then officially joined the organization on the 16th. So I'm glad to hear it was impressive. That wasn't necessarily the goal. The goal was selfish. It was to help me do my job.
[00:17:40] BW: Yeah. I do think that it made a statement, though, for sure. I'm curious, in those conversations that happened there and since then, what are you sensing are some of the biggest challenges/opportunities that might be facing USA Fencing? What are you hearing from the members out there?
[00:17:58] PA: You know what? I think there's a few issues, and I'm going to
speak rather candidly. I think there's a challenge that we have with trust in the organization right now, and I think we need to be honest among that as an organization. A wise man once said to me, “Trust is earned in drops and spent in buckets.” We need to earn some more of those drops. I think we can do that by unrelenting commitment to transparency.
I'm really glad we have two people in our comms team, Bryan, yourself, and Amanda Mastera, who are really committed to that ethos. That includes, by the way, raising our hand when we as an organization don't get things right. I think we need to do that as we move forward here. So I think that's number one is rebuilding and keeping the trust of our community.
Now, I think there's reasons why that's been eroded over time, and it's no secret that we have a lot of turnover from the office side of things. It's no secret that we've had some challenges in our membership over the last number of arguably years. Now's the time to put our eyes on the road forward and to be transparent about how we're fixing some of those issues, how we're going to make sure that our membership in certain areas is held to account and our membership can hold us to account as an organization. Frankly, show what we're doing to grow the sport. Show what we're doing to build community and invite feedback from our membership. I think that's what we really need to do is build community.
I think the second thing is there's a sense of – As we come back from COVID, there’s a need to build our group. We need to have a plan through not only Paris but more particularly Los Angeles 2028. I think I've been impressed with the amount of people who've mentioned the word Paralympics in that too. I think we've got opportunities in para fencing to grow our disabled sport community, which got some great unique athletes. I’ve spent some time with para fencing camp last week, and I was delighted with what I found.
But at the same time, I think there's a lot of room for growth across the country in para fencing. I think there's opportunities to grow the sport too. I think we have a duty to help our clubs who ultimately will always be the leading light in growing the sport of fencing. I think collegiate is another issue. I think we have to part carefully with our college colleagues to retain the current college programs across the country and hopefully grow that too. That is going to be a challenge in the coming years, as the NCAA itself changes.
I think there's a fair prediction that the number of sponsored sports will likely decrease, not increase, over the coming few years. In sports like fencing, you have a smaller number of schools that, albeit with a large tradition, may be at risk from some of those cuts. And I fear that might be the case and then another thing that's important for us to be on top of. So I think really coming down to getting more in touch with our grassroots community and growing that community. Obviously, that doesn't exclude concentrating efforts around our elite athletes, both Olympic and Paralympic, in the course of the run up to both Paris and Los Angeles. But I think it's really, really important to spend some time getting down into the grassroots and rebuilding trust of that group.
Expanding the services that we offer as a group, I think, is another area where we can make impact fairly quickly. I think we're on the road to doing that. Then I think, again, we have – We were lucky to have this, a long standing group at fencing for about 10 years, which means I think there's areas even that we do well, such as on national events, which it's time to take a look at and say, “Are we doing this the right way? Or can we do this a little bit better or just differently?” That’s not to say what we're doing is bad. It's just to say, “All right, we've done this for 10 years. Is it time for a change? And if it is, why? And if not, why?”
[00:22:23] BW: I know that that process will involve you trying to get feedback from the members as well. I want to mention that the way that you appear to like to receive feedback isn't just in person. I know when we announced your hiring, one thing you emailed me and said, “Can you put my email address in there?”
I also know that you are active on Instagram. You're @a.phil. I want to mention Instagram specifically because at USA Weightlifting, you would do these Instagram Q&As, where you were basically opening the floodgates and saying, “Hey, ask me any question you have,” which is, it's pretty brave, right? Because we know that these online audience as will, and sometimes they can be very honest with their feedback. So what was the motivation there? What, in general, would you like our community to know about how you are willing to receive feedback?
[00:23:20] PA: Yeah. I mean, look, we have to meet our members where they are. I think sometimes people like to be active on social media but not so much email. Sometimes, people like a one-on-one phone or Zoom conversation. Sometimes, people like an in-person conversation. All of those are okay, and I think it's important to be receptive to those when your job is to run a membership organization. When you're running a membership organization, you might want to hear from the members.
[00:23:46] BW: Go figure.
[00:23:48] PA: Right. For example, yesterday or the last working day, which was just Friday, I asked Hunter, who runs our IT programs, to open up all joint mailboxes, so things like information@usafencing.org to me, because for me, it's important to hear directly from members. Number one, it’s important to be willing to answer pretty much any question that's posed, and I think it's important too to just have a sense and not lose touch of what's going on in a given community. I think that's easy to do and get drawn into the day-to-day. There's a lot of it. There's a lot of things that we have to do day in, day out on the back of house to run a national governing body, and that's ever increasing with, for example, USOPC compliance.
Go back 10 years, that really wasn't something that NGB had to do. Now, we have a 23-page compliance guide that we have to day-to-day keep up with, and we'll get audited on, and then that's due to start here in just about a month. So that is a full-time. That's why we have Christina. One of the reasons we have Christina's position is because we have to be on top of all that stuff. There was a lot that happens day-to-day to keep any national governing body running, and it’s the CEO’s job to be on top of that.
But it's also the CEO’s job to not get disconnected from the community which they serve. I think that's where being open to those different sorts of feedback and different sorts of questions helps. But I think, also, it gives you an opportunity to speak to the members. Okay, we thought that we explained really well why we're doing X. But if we didn't, our community then tell us that. Therefore, we need to make sure that we're giving why explanation.
Just the way I like to work, there's nothing wrong with other CEOs who don't choose to work that way. There are some extremely successful CEOs who don't work that way. But that's the way I like to work and the way I like to be present in a membership organization like this. So to the point, I encourage people to reach out by any of those methods; email, phone, Instagram.
[00:25:59] BW: Yeah, great. p.andrews@usafencing.org, right?
[00:26:02] PA: 303-521-3689.
[00:26:05] BW: Oh, is that your cellphone number? Okay.
[00:26:07] PA: That’s my number.
[00:26:08] BW: Well, there we go.
[00:26:08] PA: Use it if you wish.
[00:26:09] BW: So one thing you said to me that really resonated was that, yeah, NGB has a word governing in it. So, officially, we might be a governing organization. But you actually think we should think of ourselves more of as a service organization. Can you tell me what you meant by that?
[00:26:25] PA: Yeah. So it's a little cheesy. I serve a national governing body. I like to think of NGB as an NSP, a national service body. I think it's our job to serve our members, as opposed to governing them. Yes. Do we have to have rules? Yes. Do we have to enforce those? To be clear, yes, both of those things are true. Do we have to set selection procedures? Yes, we do. But at its core, we are service body. We have members. In some other organizations, a member might be called a customer, and it's your job to please that customer, so they keep coming back.
I think it's no different in USA Fencing. We need to make sure that we are serving our athletes and also our coaches and referees and general membership so that they want to remain a USA Fencing member, and they have a good experience in the sport of fencing. One of the ways we need to partner with our clubs is to make sure that the experience or what I call the member journey, from picking up a weapon for the first time through to being a veteran fencer, is relatively as smooth as possible. To the extent we can, we will remove the roadblocks from that being a true lifetime sport, particularly in your desire for it to be a true lifetime sport.
Now, life happens. People move away from the sport for various reasons. But our mindset has to be about service to each other internally, to our clubs, but particularly to each and every individual member. Now, I want to be clear. Does that mean we're going to agree with every single member? Probably not. But it does mean that when we disagree, we do it respectfully, and we do it with a clear explanation.
It's my view that fencers in particular are intelligent people. I think it's a very intelligent, very well-read community. If you look at some of the backgrounds of fencers, let me use Kat Holmes as an example, one of our Olympians. She somehow manages to balance a very high level education on her journey to become a doctor, including an undergrad at Princeton, being an Olympian, and therefore being one of the world's leading fencers, and also being on the board and an athlete representative. By the way, she still has a life, and it's unreal the amount of things that Kat manages to fit in. But it doesn't appear to me to be incredibly unusual for that level of person to be in this sport.
So what I'm getting at is I think reasonable people come to the same conclusions, given the same information. I think that's the ethos that I like to take is that we can have reasonable conversations with our membership. But those conversations need to be based in service.
[00:29:11] BW: Yeah. Kind of to close here, that service piece is something that, really, I think, has already defined your time here as CEO, which is that you are here to serve the staff. I know you've sent me messages saying, “How can I help you today?” That took me aback a little bit at first when I was like, “Wait, aren't I working for you?” But that already is extending to the membership, right? Because you haven't put these layers between you and the members. You're saying, “Hey, come at me anytime and let me know how I can serve you.” So I think what's the kind of takeaway that you'd like listeners to know about you, your style, and how you'd like to work with them going forward?
[00:29:54] PA: Yeah. I think you've just said it, to be honest. Expect service from our organization and expect to be able to reach out and have a conversation. In fact, be encouraged to reach out to have a conversation, not just with me, but with our staff as a whole. In particular, we can only help our fencing community in the way that the fencing community tells us we can help. So we are now a truly nationwide organization, Bryan sitting in the middle of Pennsylvania. I'm sitting in the middle of Colorado. But we have employees all over the country. But we can't possibly know what 40,000 people know.
I think, for me, the biggest message is reach out. I'm new to this sport. Many of our staff are too, and we need the help of our community to understand what can we do best and most effectively. The resources are relatively limited. It doesn't mean we have none. But it doesn't mean that we have unlimited resources. What can we do best with our time, money, true, and with effort to improve, A, the life of a current fencer, then that member journey? B, how can we best serve and help our community grow? I'd encourage anybody who wants to have that conversation to reach out.
[00:31:11] BW: That's great. Well, thank you, Phil. We're just out of time. But thanks to Phil Andrews. It was a really enjoyable conversation. I know I speak for us all in saying welcome, and we look forward to working with you.
[00:31:22] PA: Thank you very much.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:31:24] BW: Thanks for listening to First to 15, the official podcast of USA Fencing. We'll be back with our next conversation in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, you can stay up to date on all the latest fencing news by following us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. If you liked this podcast, please help us grow and reach more people by leaving us a rating or review. Until next time, I'm Bryan Wendell, and I hope to see you real soon out on the Strip. Bye.
[END]