This has been a huge learning year for me in my first year as CEO. I came into the job without all the preliminary apprenticeship years such as a Regional Association or a Regional Councillor, so you might say that I have either been untutored in the ways of the PNZ, or I have brought a fresh pair of eyes to bear on the organisation.
My background in business has given me a big advantage in looking at the organisation and structure of the PNZ, and in assessing the suitability of the PNZ' processes to its needs.
I could fill this report with the year' major happenings such as National and International Tournaments, the Trans Tasman Test Matches, the Women’s Worlds and so on, but these are by and large "usiness as usual" I could talk at length about the great results achieved by our Trans Tasman teams, and all the members of the PNZ applaud their great success against our traditional Aussie sporting rivals, but in the time available to me here I would like to highlight three major topics which I believe have had the most impact on our year, and on the future development on our sport in NZ.
Before I deal with these topics I want to thank all those individuals who have stepped up to the plate and been involved in the sport of petanque in NZ — from the club officials, the umpires, the coaches, the tournament organisers, the magazine editors and contributors, the managers of the international teams, the managers of official websites, the unofficial websites, the Blogs and so on.
Most importantly, I want to thank my colleagues on the Executive: Barbara Whittington and Brian Smith, in particular, who get through a mountain of work during the year. I would also like to thank very sincerely the members of the wider executive — Trevor Neilson, our tournament director, Andy Gilbert, our Director of Umpiring, Neil Goodwin our Director of Coaching, Joanne Lippard our Director of PR and sponsorships, and Liz & Michael Rocks for their continued support in the areas of overseas liaison and tournaments. I would like to make a mention of David Lippard and Michael Emerson who have both achieved international level 2 coaching certificates under Victor Nataf. All of these people have worked behind the scenes to make this year function, and I believe that all of the members of the PNZ owe them a vote of thanks for their continuing support and contribution to our sport. Two of our Directors retire this year And, our Director of Umpiring has got our organisation of umpiring on the right track, and now feels that he wants to spend more time honing his game. I wish him well and thank him for his contribution to our sport. Neil, our Director of Coaching, has, in conjunction with David Lippard, started the process of coaching the coaches at club level in the N. Island; and has demonstrated the great value of formally coaching and qualif~’ing coaches. This process has not yet reached the S.Island due to the Neil’s unfortunate ill health, which has also forced his resignation as the Director. I wish Neil a complete return to good health, and thank him for his major contribution to our sport.
So now to return to my main themes of this report. I want to highlight three major topics which I believe will influence the direction taken by us in the foreseeable future.
These topics are:
I believe that the recent visit of Victor Nataf, and a team of three world class French players to NZ in Jan/Feb this year, will in time be regarded as the watershed of our sport in NZ, in terms of the level we aspire to in the game, and more importantly, in terms of our approach to the organisation and structure of the game. There is a saying: "If you are in a rut, the edges of the rut are your horizon". With the exception of those players who had travelled to international tournaments, and had seen the skill levels and tactical understanding of the game at the highest level, most of us had no idea of the levels we could aspire to in the game, and what it takes to reach those levels. We had developed an idea that the levels we were playing the game at — even at National level — were reasonably competitive. The French visit quickly showed that the game in NZ needed to take a good hard look at itself, if those who aspired to compete on an international level were to be properly trained, coached and selected to a standard at which we could compete on the world stage.
There are those in our sport who believe that we should not even be thinking of competing on the world stage, let alone aspiring to excel at that level. NZ sportsmen and women have repeatedly shown that we can produce world class athletes who can compete on the world stage and be successful, provided we chose to join the mainstream of our sport, and prepare our athletes to compete with other nations on an even footing. I believe the time is right to move into a more professional approach to our sport, the time of the gifted enthusiast, who can just appear at a world venue, with minimum preparation and organisation, and have a fun time and win is now over in every sport in NZ. We must now decide whether we are going to compete on the world stage, or whether we are going to keep the status quo, and just continue as we are in the certain knowledge that we will stay in the same league as we currently are. If we want to stay in the same league as we currently enjoy — the "also ran’s" league - we need do nothing more than we are currently doing. But if we want to join the big boys of our sport — even in our own region - the French visit told us that we have to do things a lot differently.
To this end, the Executive will recommend to Council that the PNZ adopts the recommendations of the paper detailing new proposals for implementing a structure and process for the coaching of all interested players in NZ and for the selection and coaching of regional and national teams. This paper has been prepared by David Lippard, with some input from those of us who were privileged to have a series of discussions with Victor Nataf during the visit of the French team. I believe that this structure and the system behind it will make the selection of players for international events a completely objective exercise, where the players themselves will be able to see what they need to do at every stage of their career, in order to make the NZ team for a series of international tournaments — ranging from the Trans Tasman tournament to the Asian, Women's, and Open World Events. I believe that the development of a strong and objective selection process will be one of the defining issues for our sport in the next few years. We may not achieve all we wish to achieve in the first year, but as long as we have a long term objective, and defmed steps for achieving this objective along the way, I believe we can go a long way towards solving one of the more divisive issues of our sport. I see the development of a strong coaching structure and the development of an objective selection process as going hand in hand, and I believe this will be the major goal of the Executive in the coming year.
Almost as a corollary to this objective is the desire to change the actual governance structure of the PNZ. We moved to our present two tier structure about 5 years ago, as a result of a dissatisfaction with the older structure which represented a copy of a typical club governance structure of a President, Secretary and Treasurer and a number of committee members — drawn from the organisation as a whole — in other words a structure designed for a small club.
When this model proved unsatisfactory, we moved to a model recommended by SPARC for large sporting bodies — a split governance/management structure, with a Board to set strategy and an Executive to carry out that strategy and do the day to day management.
However, shortcomings in this structure for PNZ have been apparent for some time, especially with the "regional representation" model:
It is recognised in the literature that the formal split governance/management structure may be less appropriate for small voluntary organisations, such as PNZ, where there are a limited number of people willing to take office. In this situation, everyone has to have a job, "do" as well as "think". We just do not have the luxury of having "thinkers only" in a Council, who meet once or twice a year and then expect their decisions to be acted on by others. We need "doers" and lots of them if we are to move forward in the PNZ.
It is therefore proposed that we should simplify the structure by removing the "regional" layer of administration, and move to a single Board consisting of a President, Vice-president and 3 other Directors. These people are to be elected for their skills, knowledge and expertise, by the membership, through their clubs. We have put detailed proposals to all the regions and clubs and these proposals will be voted on this weekend.
There is one last observation that 1 would like to make to our organisation. As an executive group we are heavily criticised for not putting our energies into a myriad of possible actions to improve our sport. Some of this criticism may be justified, but without human resources to do some of the work involved it becomes a matter of pnoritising the work we do. As a symptom of the malaise, we have the incident of the out-going Chairman of the Council presenting 26 remits for this AGM, and well over 100 agenda items for his successors in the Council to handle at the next Council meeting. This volume of possible topics is either a measure of the person’s creativity, or the measure of his frustration at the lack of progress in some areas of our sport. Either way, not many of these topics will be handled either in a few hours of this meeting orin the year to follow, but I sympathise with his problem. There are areas of action we are failing to take because we simply do not have the people to carry them out. The new structure we are presenting to Council this weekend will go some way to alleviating the situation, but without members at large coming forward to offer their help in many areas ranging from fund raising, to coaching, to umpiring, to managing teams, to taking on the roles of team captain, organising uniforms, accommodation, transport etc, the level of activity in our sport will remain largely as it currently is. It seems that everyone wants to play the sport, and have everything organised on their behalf, and few are willing to give of their time at the expense of playing the sport. This is my call for a reality check by our members. Either take an active part in the management of our sport, or expect the level of activity to be much the same in 2 008/09 as it has been in 2007, and before that.