Houston Wild president Karen Fraser fueled by passion for the game
Webmaster of the Week: March 13-19
Name:
Karen Fraser
Site:
Houston Wild
Position:
President, webmaster
Use of platform:
Registration, Sitebuilder
Background:
When Fraser moved from her hometown Calgary to Houston with her family in 2010, topping the to-do list was finding a home in an area near a hockey rink. “My husband (Mark) has always played hockey, and my boys were 4 and 6 when we moved here,” she said. “If they weren’t going to be able to keep playing hockey, I said we’re not moving to Houston.” It didn’t take long for the Fraser’s to embed themselves with the Houston Wild Hockey Club, which joined forces with the Houston Junior Aeros Hockey Association more than a decade ago. Both boys, Ryan and Matthew, play on Wild teams. Mark is a coach in the organization and Karen took over as president in October. “I think I am just a volunteer by nature,” said Fraser, who had served as the Wild’s ice scheduler for three years before taking over as president. “I need to be busy all the time. I call it the Volunteer Vortex, and I just got sucked in.”
What she does:
“I was really lucky that our association has been really well run for as long as I can remember,” Fraser said. “I kind of feel like I am tweaking things.” Among those tweaks was a mini-redesign of the Wild’s home page that involved moving several separate links and news items into a news slideshow for a more streamlined look. “I’ve kind of been working on getting it as simple as it possibly could be,” she said. Fraser still does the Wild’s scheduling, and she worked with a “techie dad” to re-write the organization’s schedule in Excel so that it would work with Sitebuilder’s schedule upload template. Fraser also creates and updates all of the club’s registrations. Fraser said the previous Wild president, Karen Young, created and still updates the site’s Alumni section.
Making her mark:
Fraser is working to set up survey reports that show each teams’ parent contact information, then placing it on a private page in which only coaches have access.
