January 2025 - 14

Diving In
Programmer Sue Manning is Volunteer of the Year
By Chip Dombrowski
B
ehind every great volunteer is
another great volunteer.
Twice in the past four years,
the Nadine Wood Volunteer of the
Year award has gone to someone
working on one of the technological
advances that have changed the landscape
of online bridge. Four years
ago, it was Jay Whipple, for creating
the virtual clubs, among other things.
Two years ago, it was Brian Platnick
and Franco Baseggio, for EDGAR, the
computer-based cheating-detection
program. Not to take anything away
from these recipients, Sue Manning of
Ithaca NY played a small role in both
of these developments, serving as the
meetings secretary and webmaster
for the virtual club project and writing
some code for EDGAR.
Meanwhile, she also had her hand
in just about every other bridge technology
of the past five years, from
the Shark Bridge teaching console to
Swan Games to numerous projects
with Whipple and the ACBL information
technology department. Taken
together, Manning's contributions are
not small. She is the 2024 Volunteer
of the Year.
" She is a relentless volunteer, "
said Whipple, who has seen much of
Manning's work up close. " She finds
these projects that are going on and
volunteers to help. She does whatever
they need. People quickly realize how
capable, trustworthy and helpful she
is. She's extremely talented. I love
working with her. "
Looking at the list of Manning's
contributions and seeing how many
of them involve Whipple - who in
2023 was inducted into the Hall of
Fame for his service to the bridge
community - you might think they'd
known each other for decades from
14 | Bridge Bulletin | January 2025
their professional careers in technology.
But it turns out they met in
March 2020, when Whipple and former
Bridge Base Online CEO Uday
Ivatury were beginning their work on
the virtual club platform.
Manning was a volunteer at the
Bridge Club of Ithaca, and she had
the same idea: She was looking for
a way to hold her club games online.
She kept pestering people at BBO and
the ACBL until someone, she doesn't
remember who, told her she needed
to talk to Whipple.
She came to the meetings of those
working on the project and, while
Zoom was still new to all of them,
took responsibility for recording
the meetings and storing them on a
website along with other documents
related to the project.
" [Whipple] had this document he
would update every week, " Manning
explained. " He gave me access to it.
I kept sending him corrections and
corrections and corrections, because
he's a terrible writer. So he put me in
charge of it. "
That was just the beginning.
" She kept saying, 'Is there anything
else I can help with?' " Whipple said.
" I'd say, 'Want to try this?' and she
just took it and ran with it. Her work
is really high quality. "
Manning's bridge journey began
when she was working at Xerox
between 1985 and 1987. Occasionally
co-workers needed her to sit in as a
fourth. It didn't happen very often,
and she didn't give the game another
thought for more than 20 years.
Manning started working for Apple
as a systems programmer in 1987.
Her husband, Alan Demers, had
been a computer science professor
at Cornell - where Manning got her
master's degree - who also went to
work for Apple. In 2000, they went
back to Ithaca so Demers could
return to Cornell and Manning could
be closer to her mother. She continued
working for Apple remotely for a
few years, retiring early in 2002. She
battled cancer and recovered, and
by 2010, was looking for a new challenge.
A friend wanted to take bridge
lessons at Cornell's campus club, and
she agreed to go along.
After a few years, she was ready to
take the next step, going to a teaching
session at the Bridge Club of Ithaca,
and she joined the ACBL in 2014. She's
about 65 points - including 20 silver
- away from making Life Master, but
isn't particularly trying to get there.
" It's really hard on your ego, " she
said of bridge. " I love that I'll never
get good at it. "
As she got involved in bridge,
Manning saw how much everything
in bridge depended on volunteers. " If
you don't volunteer, who's going to do
it? " she said. " I do my best to use my
talents to help them. "
Manning directs her club's one
online game per week and makes
all the boards for the in-person
games. She keeps the club's dealing
machine at home to keep it safe from
untrained hands.
The pandemic opened a lot of volunteer
opportunities for her. " I talked
to more people in the pandemic than
I ever did before that, " she said.
Manning is an avid consumer of
bridge educational materials and has
assisted a number of teachers and
developers with teaching technologies.
She got to know Milen Milkovski,
the developer of Shark Bridge,
through one of his other projects, the
Audrey Grant Better Bridge app. She
January 2025

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