It is my privilege and pleasure to present this, the President's Annual Report for the year ending 31 December 2009.
Membership has remained reasonably stable although many weekend days' play were lost due to the very wet weather. Rain can be a little discouraging for people considering taking up pétanque.
I had hoped that 2009 would have seen people with appropriate skills come forward to assist in the promotion of pétanque in our region. Unfortunately this did not happen. Perhaps we will see some members put their hands up for this year.
A group comprising Claire Bradburn, Myles Cowper, Fay Doyle, Michael Rocks and Richard Turfrey make up this subcommittee. While only one meeting has been held each member went away with a task to perform. Fay sent out a request for information on membership which unfortunately had a mixed response. Richard will be sending out a questionnaire aimed at gathering data on the steps clubs have taken to promote their club and their sport, Myles is working on promotion material, Michael has been talking with various people and Claire has been working with College Sport Wellington to find better ways to promote pétanque at college level. The 2010 College Sport Wellington Pétanque Tournament will be held at Park Avenue on Tuesday 21 September.
In 2009 six of our members reached the necessary standard required to represent New Zealand.
Congratulations to Open Team members; Barbara Johnston, Claire Wilson and Dirk Winnie and to Senior Team members; Joan Miller, Rex Hayes and Graeme Morris. Barbara Johnston also represented NZ at The Women's World Championships in Turkey. Well done Barbara.
Changes in the selection process created some difficulties for the participants and, while many of these processes were sorted for the next round, there are still some problem areas.
It has been a busy year with many tournaments requiring umpires, and some clubs asking if we could oblige for their open tournament and we have been pleased to have been able to do so. Mostly though we supply our members for WPA events and also assist Barbara Whittington (National Umpire) when any National events are held in our region. We usually supply two umpires more particularly if we utilize a club member at the tournament.
There were about 15 Wellington players who put their name forward to do the theory examination to become Club Umpires and of this number eight completed the papers with five passing. This was a very pleasing result but unfortunately these Club Umpires have not been able to complete the practical examination to gain their Regional status as the National Umpire (Barbara Whittington) has been unable to fit in a week-end to do so. Barbara is not only a National Umpire, acting as Director of Umpiring, answering umpiring questions, but she is also the secretary for the PNZ, works and has a family with many interests so she finds it very difficult to fit everything into her schedule.
We are hopeful that PNZ will be able to find a Director of Umpiring very shortly and this will take quite a burden off Barbara. We do have one or two umpires in our region who would like to become National Umpires but until we are able to have someone from overseas work with Barbara for this in New Zealand, it seems umpires are doomed to remain Regional Umpires unless they travel overseas at their own cost to complete examinations.
During 2009 we purchased five high visibility vests for our umpires and in December 2009 we purchased a further 3 vests as we had those extra five Club Umpires plus the four we already had. These vests have made it so much easier for players to see umpires exactly when required but also it allows those umpires playing in a tournament to concentrate on their game without being called. Most of our umpires are playing umpires so at least all players can easily see who are the umpires for the day and our requirement for the umpires of the day wearing these is necessary.
In addition to the visibility vests, we purchased one of the new umpiring kits prepared by Pétanque New Zealand. The kit proved to a great asset to those umpires who used it, so a second kit was purchased at the end of 2009.
The WPA also set a cap on money paid out to umpires ($15) for non-playing umpires only for the day. One must apply for this but so far there have been no requests as umpires are more than happy to fulfill their duties. We see no reason at this point in time that it should be increased.
Wellington now has 15 umpires in total and that is very satisfying - now we just need to be able to upgrade the Club Umpires and we will be very well placed to attend tournaments with Regional Umpires and able to assist the National Umpire when national events are held in our region.
This year we ran tournaments with seeded pools rather than random (snake draw). This was designed to make the first round as even and fair as possible but also to put the pressure on from the start so that players become focused from the start of the tournament. One tournament was even run entirely with barrage pools. Whilst many players didn't understand the concept at first, we had many encouraging comments made at the end of that tournament.
One of the areas the sub-committee is trying to sort out is the presentation of trophies - how many and how much do we spend. This is coming up as an item under general business at the AGM.
During the year Dirk Winnie ran a number of coaching sessions. Some of these were open to all players and others were concentrated on players wishing to make the WPA representative team. The effort put in by Dirk, his helpers and the players was well worth while as both the Tri-Star Trophy and the Hawkes Bay Challenge Match were won by Wellington. Well done.
2009 was a busy one for me and I really appreciated the help I received behind the scenes from a great many people. My thanks to all who helped ensure our members enjoyed their pétanque whether it was at Club level or in competition. I hope you all enjoyed your year of pétanque and will continue to do so in this coming year.
Claire Bradburn