Getting ready for Council

I've finally got the last of the player info in for the July Golf Croquet World Championship (hurrah!) and only have a few items missing still for the Under 21s. I wouldn't have believed how much time and effort it takes to get biographies, photos and email addresses in.  We're planning that in our new website, we'll have the ability for players to login and upload their own photos and bios.  It will still no doubt take some chasing for updates and missing info, but at least I won't have to wrestle with all the wild and whacky formats sent in response to a request for "a Word doc or text".

We're holding a Council Meeting of all 27 Members at Surbiton, on Sunday 17th July - sandwiched between the Under 21 GCWC and the main GC World Championship, which starts on the 18th.  All Resolutions have to be produced and distributed two months before - so by 17th May.  So at present the MC is focused on turning a number of things we've been working on for the past 6 months into specific Resolutions to Council.

For example, I've gone through the 10 Year Schedule proposal and the responses to this consultation from Members, and we've identified a number of things for the MC to put in place and also 3 specific Resolutions to Council.  There's also one area which requires much more thought than expected so we are delaying that till after Council - that's the question of what funding model should be used for team events.  The consultation responses were all happy with how we handle event funding for singles - especially now we have halved the licence fee.  But for team events it all becomes much more complicated - so we've put that to one side for now.

We've also got the first ever set of Finance Regulations and Investment Policy ready for ratification, and also a Resolution to start a 2 year trial of the new decision-making process we've recently consulted on.

So for the next 2 weeks, I think we'll be preoccupied with getting ready for Council.  Though actually, I'm off to Hunstanton for the next 3 days for a tournament delightfully known to old hands as "The Pilchard"!

Let's hope the weather holds.

Martin French