Welcome to you all – to our club delegates, to our District Committee members, and to our Life Member Mrs Pat Humphries.
I am pleased to be able to report to you today that this has been a very successful and interesting year for the MPDWG. We have conducted a variety of golf events hosted by many different clubs, and generally had excellent fields. The exceptions were the Hiscock Salver last week where entries were down, and the Junior Championships which had to be cancelled because of the small number of entries. The Committee is considering the reasons for this, and will look at ways of encouraging a better response in 2010. A change to our events has been the awarding of vouchers to the winners instead of plates and vases etc: this is easier to manage and we hope more acceptable to the recipients.
Although we are not generally a fund-raising organisation special efforts at the Beacon Plate held just after the Black Saturday fires, raised $1000 which was a credit to all those who contributed.
The Champion of Champions was a new event, and its success will have it remain in our syllabus. The re-introduced Interclub competition ran smoothly, and because of this it has been decided to revert to scratch play in Division 3 pennant in 2010 after a couple of years of handicap match play. The other change to our Pennant program was in regard to lunches, and after a few early problems the new system seems to have been well accepted. The Conditions of Play for Pennant have been revised, and they along with a draft Draw are available today. Please consider them carefully and notify our acting Tournament Secretary Val of any problems.
Two new features this year have been the issuing of a Tournament Handbook with entry forms for all events, and the compiling of a Standard Conditions of Play document to cover all events. The handbook for 2010 will be ready at the beginning of the year, and all entry forms will also be available on the website.
The use of the website has made a difference to the way we manage our events, and we encourage all clubs to publicise it to their members as the main source of information about District affairs. For example – in most competitions there are inevitable changes to the timesheet and the responsibility for knowing about changes must increasingly rest with the player, rather than as in the past when the Tournament Secretary would notify the captain who then would have to ring her club members.
This year a revision of the Statement of Purposes and Schedule of Rules – what we have in the past called the Constitution – has been undertaken, and it will be presented to you for acceptance today. It doesn’t make any great changes to the way the MPDWG has been run. Like Conditions of Play, Constitutions are rarely read until something goes wrong, but then it is very important to have a precise document to refer to.
Another extensive revision has been made to the Role Statements for our committee members. It is in speaking about the Committee that I wish to finish this report today.
We have worked harmoniously during the year, and all members agreed to nomination again for 2010. We expected that because everyone would have seen how much fun we have that there would be a flood of other nominations but sadly that was not the case. So all our current committee will be serving again and I look forward to working with them all. Many have had health problems during the year, either their own or in the family, but the work has still been done. We have been particularly concerned for our Tournament Secretary Ros Harding whose husband has been very ill, and who is currently on leave-of-absence to care for him. We hope that he will continue to recover now. In Ros’ absence Val Peppler has been Acting Tournament Secretary and we thank her for her efforts and the thoroughness of her work, at a very busy time of the golfing year.
A stable committee is a good thing, but it is also important to have new people with fresh ideas and interests from time to time. I would urge all our members, particularly those from clubs not presently represented, to consider joining the District Committee in future years.
Please be sure to let us know when there are ways you think we could improve our organisation, and we are always so pleased too that so many of our affiliates are ready to show their appreciation for the work done by committee members to make their golf enjoyable. If it was a “thankless task” then I think committee places would be hard to fill.
Thank you all for coming today.
Alison Jones
President