Where did September go?

I finally found how much croquet is 'too much' - playing every weekend for a couple of months - I did get to the point of arriving at an event thinking "I'd rather be at home catching up with xyz".  Not an ideal frame of mind!  Still, the season ended on a high - I played for Colchester in the CA's Interclub Championship final and we won.  Fellow MC-member, Ian Burridge was also on the team.  Bizarrely, this "last day of the season" was also the hottest weather I'd played in all year!

After Charles Jones' murder, we rallied and asked Amir Ramsis (MC member and Vice-President of Egyptian Croquet Fed) to take the role of Acting President, which he kindly accepted.  We've started the process for the annual elections in December and called for nominations for President and MC posts.

Our new website is getting closer, and our website committee has been looking at a partly complete new site prepared by James Hawkins.  It should be more attractive and easier to use and update, so I'm looking forward to it going live.  I continue to find it hard to keep the existing site current, as it can be a bit scarey to edit!

We've consulted with our Members on the changes to our Statutes necessary to implement the new email-based decision-making process, approved by Council in July.  We'll shortly take a revised copy of the Statutes to a vote (under the old 60 day postal vote scheme of course), and if passed, we'll then be into the 21st Century and able to work electronically!

We polled all the players in this July's championships (Golf Croquet at Hurlingham & Surbiton, and Under 21s at Hunstanton) and got feedback from about a third.  This has been shared in full with the organisers and host, and summarised on our website.  Generally, the events were both well-liked, though there are things to note for next time.

We're currently working on the detail to implement a decision of the "4 Governing Bodies" that control and play in the MacRobertson Shield - to pass the administration over to the WCF and make the Mac clearly Tier 1 of the Association Croquet World Team Championship.  This is how it was staged in August 2010 but we need now to cement that structure.  I hope we'll have a draft set of changes to our Statutes and Regs ready for the 4 Governing Bodies to consider very soon.

Finally, we're getting well-advanced now with preparations for the 4th Women's GC World Championship this November, in Bay of Plenty region, New Zealand, and 13th ACWC next April/ May in Adelaide, as well as making some initial progress too on the 1st Women's AC World Championship, which is likely to be next October. 

There always seems to be so much to do!

Martin French
Secretary-General

What happens next….

After Charles Jones’ horrific murder in Thailand, his body was repatriated to New Zealand and his funeral was last Saturday.  My sympathies to his family and friends.

After some thought, the Management Committee has decided to ask Amir Ramsis – who has been on the MC since 2003 – to take the role of Acting President for the next 4 months.  Amir is also Vice-President of the Egyptian Croquet Federation and frequently travels to GC events round the world.

The WCF Statutes envisage routine elections every November/ December for any roles on the MC that have become vacant through rotation and retirement – so we will include the election for the next President in this timetable.

In the next 4 months, we have just one event, the Women’s GCWC in New Zealand in November.  Amir was already planning to accompany the Egyptian women’s squad there, so will be able to present the prizes and speak on behalf of the WCF too.

Apart from that, the MC has been working through all the actions from the July Council Meeting.  We have been drafting revised Statutes to embody all the processes required by the decision to start a 2 year trial in January of the new email-based discussion and decision process of Council.  These are almost ready now to go to the Members for a consultation cycle prior to a formal postal vote (under the existing 60 day postal process, of course).

We’ve also been working on finalising the 10 Year Schedule of events and the format descriptions for each of the 8 approved event types, and these are again just about ready to go out to the Members along with a call for bids for events through to the end of 2014.  This will allow us to have a clear forward programme of events in place, for some years ahead.

Personally I’ve also been busy with several croquet tournaments (a late-season flourish, playing every weekend for the next 4 weeks), and also being very involved in the negotiations and planning to move my local croquet club (Ipswich CC) from its position in a local park, to a golf club a couple of miles out of town.  The improved facilities will make it much easier, we hope, to recruit and retain new members.   So a busy early Spring next year in prospect, with a hut to build and everything to arrange.

In the meantime, may your swing be straight and your aim true.

In the thick of it

(...but without all the swearing, for those of you who followed the TV series of this title!)

So we're pretty much ready for the Council Meeting on Sunday 17th July now.  We've received postal votes from all those Members I was expecting to vote by email rather than in person, and we have 25 delegates registered to attend in person.

All last week I was playing in the British Opens at Surbiton, which gave me a chance to check out the facilities we'll be using for the Council Meeting.  I have to say, Surbiton has done wonders.  I think I last played there a bit over 20 years ago, when the lawns were quite ordinary and the club hut almost finished.  Now the 7 lawns are some of the flatest I've played on (lovely being able to approach close to a hoop without having to worry about your ball falling to one side at the last minute) - George Noble and team are to be congratulated.  The rest of the club's facilities are also now very good indeed, and there is a great team spirit amongst the many helpers who look after the bar, catering, BBQ, clearing and setting out the lawns and all the rest of it.  Well done Surbiton!  And to Samir for great management of the Opens.

So, the Council Meeting is there on the 17th at 1pm - preceded by a Management Committee meeting (the only time we ever get to meet face to face!) and lunch for all Council members.

Between now and then, I'm off to Hunstanton for much of next week, as the Under 21 GC World Championship starts there on Tuesday.  Monday afternoon, I'm helping to set up the safety fencing and flags, and looking after a practice session and player registration.  Ian Burridge is the Tournament Manager and Charles Jones the Tournament Ref - so a high input from the MC on this one!

Straight after the Council meeting, things start revving up for the main GC Worlds, which run from 18th to 24th July.  Stephen Mulliner is the MC lead on this one (thanks Stephen), so I'm just going to drop in once or twice during the week.  And anyway, I've got a graduation to go to in Swansea at the end of the week.

Hopefully, after that week, things will calm down.  Then there is all the follow-up to do from Council (writing minutes, circulating any further papers, identifying all the follow-up actions....) and then the large heap of topics we've put to one side to look at after Council is done.  A couple of these will be urgent - especially tryng to move the bids for the first GC World Team Championship forward.  We want to stage the event in about 15 months time, and have a lot to do to be ready for then.

Next blog will probably be after the Council meeting, giving my first-time impressions of this annual fest.

Martin French

Where did June go?

My last post was about getting the main batch of papers out for the WCF Council meeting scheduled for the 17th July.  That was in May - the second (and final) batch had to go out by 17th June and took a lot of effort to finalise.

There were no formally-submitted amendments to the Management Committee's proposals and resolutions send in the first batch, but there were a number of extra papers and some whoppers from the new Croquet Federation of India and Latvian Croquet Federation, supporting their membership applications.  These are all to be found at http://www.wcfcroquet.org/Council_2011/CouncilPapers.php.

One disappointment was that we didn't receive a finalised information pack from the Pakistan Croquet Federation - hopefully things will be sorted out there before too long.

I had some fun drafting for the MC our MC Report and a new Business Plan.  The first gave me a chance to reflect on all the stuff that's going on and to survey wat we've achieved in the past year.  The second was an opportunity to think further about where we should be going.  Our last Business Plan was very thorough - tying everything back to many objectives stated in our Statutes - but as a result was 25 pages long and not very readable.  I did my best to write our new plan in 4 pages - but subsequent edits took it up to 5.  Still I'm very pleased with this straightforward top level plan (both available at the link above).

The bit of the plan that looks tricky is getting Development rolling.  Indeed, reading some past Reports and Business Plans reveals this has been continuing lament for many years - so we need to really ask ourselves how can we make more Development progress.  Once the Council meeting is done, we'll turn more attention to this topic and see if we can make some decent progress.

Of course, we're also in the thick of the UK croquet season now, so July for me consists of:
> playing in the British Opens 3rd - 10th
> helping at the Under 21 GCWC 11th-15th
> Council Meeting 17th
> attend a bit of the GCWC say 19th or 20th
> son's graduation in Swansea 21st/22nd
> Compton tournament 30th/ 31st.
...so my apologies now if I don't get much time to post anything in July!

I hope you have the chance to play in, spectate or help with any of the WCF events in July - hope to see you there.

Martin French

First Council papers go out - Hurrah!

I've had my head down the past few weeks getting all the main papers and Resolutions ready for the July WCF Council meeting.  The Management Committee has taken the responses from the two big consultations we ran recently - on the 10 Year Schedule of events and Decision-making in the WCF - and produced some Resolutions to Council which, if approved, would give us a clear long-term programme of events and radically improve how the Members control the WCF.  Of course, we didn't get everything right in our original consultation proposals, so we have taken the comments made on board and revised the ideas in these Resolutions.

Feedback on the 10 Year Schedule was very positive, but there were several comments that there were just too many events, and also concerns about the funding model for team events and how Knock-Outs are seeded.  So in the revised 10 Year Schedule that goes to Council for approval, we have reduced the frequency of some events while keeping the premier singles events every two years and world team championships every 4 years.  We've also dealt with the other two issues raised.

The responses to the Decision-making consultation were very positive except from one Member, whose circumstances are perhaps different to most: they are a federal body representing a number of independent state administrations.  I can appreciate they will find it harder than most to consult with their member administrations and collate their responses in the proposed new model, where issues are debated in email cycles and brought to a vote.  We've made a few changes suggested and will see what the Members think.

We also have Resolutions to ratify the new WCF Finance Regs and to accept the recommendations of the WCF Ranking Review Committee, which has been examing the AC world ranking system.  They have concluded a fairer representation of a player's current form would be given by a new Dynamic Grading system in place of the current CGS.  It removes the amount of lag before new results make a major impact on your grade.  You can check the system already - if you go to the World Rankings site http://butedock.demon.co.uk/cgs/rank.php, you'll find Statto has added  a Dynamic Grade radio button.  If you click that, you'll see how your position changes under the new system.  It must be a better system, I'm 11 places higher!

This isn't all the papers for Council.  While these had to be distributed 60 days before the Council meeting, there will be some supporting documents that go out 30 days before (17th June).  I'm working on those already, including the annual MC Report.  We should also have applications to join from:

• Croquet Federation of India
• Pakistan Croquet Federation
• Latvian Croquet Federation.

That will take us to 30 Members.  If we can reach 40, then we can start thinking about World Games, the Olypmics and so on.  Perhaps that's a good goal to set for 2020.  I'm drafting our Business Plan at the moment, and that gives me an idea....

Martin French
Secretary-General

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

Interesting responses

I've still been wrestling with getting the final bits of player info in for the two events we're staging this July: the GC World Championships (Hurlingham and Surbiton) and the Under 21 GCWC (Hunstanton).  I have had to become expert at opening biographies sent to me in all sorts of whacky formats - for example I've discovered for .odt documents I can sometimes unzip them then read the XML content in Dreamweaver - and copy and paste the words into a Word document (the format requested)!

We've been running two large consultation exercises recently with our Members, and results have been coming in the past couple of weeks.  The first, called "10 Year Schedule" is the MC's attempt to pull together everything it can think about regarding events and a 10 year forward plan of which events ought to occur when - and ask the Members for their views on a number of ideas and loose ends.  Responses to this have by and large supported the MC proposals and we've started considering what Resolutions we need to put to the Council meeting this July to turn them into definite plans.

The second has been on Decision-making in the WCF.  The MC's proposal was to change Council into an engaged, decision-making body that worked via 21-day managed email cycles.  So an issue might be handled in 3 cycles: initial debate; revised proposal; formal vote.  Hopefully, the Members will get more opportunity this way to see and understand the opinions of their fellow Members.  The current Resolution and Amendment model can result in some unintended outcomes, which would have bene avoided had there been more dialogue before the vote - that's what I'm hoping we can improve upon.  The first two responses received were interesting - and 180 degrees apart.  The first agreed with every part of the MC's proposal.  The second pointed out that they were simply not resourced to handle the internal discussions required and to respond with their official views within 21 days, and preferred the existing model where people were elected to the MC to make such decisions "for the good of croquet" - with the backstop that Members can always overturn MC decisions if they think we've got them wrong.  I can quite understand this response - it was well-argued and wasn't hostile to proposal, just thought on balance they were happier with the current model.  It will be interesting to see how the remaining responses pan out.

Must dash now - the season (in UK) starts now, so I'm off to Southwick for my first A-Class wekeend of the year.  Time to think about my goal for the season: probably "to get my Grade over 2400" - I've been stuck just below for the past couple of years.  Have I plateaued??

Martin French