Hello from Martin French

Greetings!

I have just taken over from Chris Clarke as Secretary-General of the WCF.  This means you can send any questions or emails regarding the WCF to me at secretary@wcfcroquet.org. 

This is me....

...I live in Ipswich in the UK, played croquet a lot in the 80s and early 90s, then stopped for 12 years (family) and started again a few years ago.  I'm back to -1.5, mainly play Association Croquet, and am still trying to improve.  I'm on the CA's Council, and also an Examining and Championship Ref.

I'd like to thank Chris for all his hard work earlier this year as the S-G.  Chris has been doing a great job this week of sending me a zillion files and emails as handover - it'll take me a while to work through them all though!

My intention is to make the workings of the WCF and its Management Committee more transparent - this blog is just one aspect and I'll do my best to write once or twice a week about what I've been doing or what is the latest topic being discussed by the WCF MC.  While there are occasional actual meetings, and I'm hoping to get Skype conferencing in use too, the bulk of the work of the MC is done by email.  A key part of my job, as Secretary-General, will be to keep track of these email discussions and manage them towards decisions and implementation.  So I intend to use the blog to tell you what's currently on the WCF MC's mind.

There is quite a backlog of tasks to catch up with, so this first week, I've mainly been working with the rest of the MC on how we organise ourselves to get through the workload more effectively.  The work will be shared around a bit more too, with for example, specific members of the MC taking the lead for arranging particular forthcoming championships - rather than the S-G being the bottleneck in everything!

It's going to take me some time to get up to speed with everything - a particular problem being the WCF website.  I'm well aware it needs a refresh, and I've been looking into how best we go forward from here.  The site is quite complex, so it may take me a few weeks to get to grips with this.  In the meantime, I can only apologise that some data on the site is not up-to-date.

Enough for a first post.  I always welcome feedback - let me know what you thought of it.
Thanks,
Martin