|
 The 2010 ASRL AGM was well supported with a good rollup of Victorian members plus strong representation from every State.
We kicked off at 10am and a big thanks to Lifesaving Victoria for making its very comfortable facilities available to us. Great location nestled on the beach in the Bay area with a view back to the Spirit of Tasmania sitting in dock. Thanks to Frank, Guy and all the boys who pitched in to make everybody feel welcome. BBQ and some welcome ales followed at the Sandringham club facilities which was again much appreciated by all.
While on the thanks’ a very big one to Tania Sorrenti from Jan Juc
who sat all day taking the meeting minutes for us. The outcome of the
meeting via the minutes and the full Annual report will be made
available to the membership at the completion of our Audit. A few
factors didn’t work in our favour in the final week of the financial
year and the Financials while well and truly discussed at the meeting
needed a little more time to be ready for the Auditor. This was noted as
a factor of closing our books just 9 days prior to the AGM and a Notice
of Motion to reset the date of our financial year will be forthcoming.
It was agreed that everything would be completed and available to the
membership by the 30 August. We will be using the membership email to
distribute these documents but if any member would like a bound copy at
that time please contact our secretary with your postal address and will
have one sent to you.
All topics received robust debate and decisions and the meeting
closed at 2pm when everyone ran out of steam, we then retired to
Sandringham clubhouse.
A few issues that members can take on board and we welcome input on:
After we let all the dust settle on the Aussies and in fact our
own ASRL Open this season we started to look at ways of not finding
ourselves in this predicament again. Many items have been canvassed and
discussed with SLSA including but not limited to;
-
Lengthening the number of event days
-
Allowing for a lay day
-
Making more divisions available on more event days
-
Shifting the Masters forward
-
Elevating the status of the Boat Panel
-
Having a boat rower on the carnival committee
While these and a range of other issues are still being decided at
SLS headquarters one of the issues that we did raise was the development
of a Surf Safety Matrix. The idea of this would be to have a tool where
the Referee could make some well guided decisions on when to halt
racing, hold a division back, move the event etc. This will never be the
total answer but it is worth a shot at trying to develop this Matrix
into a working unit.
It would need to take into consideration such things as:
1. Competency of the Sweep – which would require a change to the
Accreditation system to have Sweeps graded
2. Weather ForecastWind strength & directionAny water movement along the beach
3. Wave height
4. Wave type
5. At what point should a grade 1, 2 or 3 sweep drop off
6. At what point should the various age divisions drop off
7. At what point does the entire event need to stop or go
8. Anything else you can think of
You would need to take it that for the sweep component to work every
sweep will need to be accessed for competency. But for this exercise let
us assume:
I. Grade 1 sweep is the learner assessed to handle waves under 1M
II. Grade 2 sweep has been assessed to handle wave condition in
clean surf to 1.5M
III. Grade 3 sweep is the experienced hand cleared for all
conditions
What we would invite the membership to do is to have a crack at
producing such a Matrix. We would like to be advised who is working on
this so we can communicate through the process. We would like to have
any completed responses back to us by the end of August. This will give
us time to decide on a best suited Matrix or to combine the best of
several and we would then look to have it operating for the 2011 ASRL
Open.
Another new innovation that we will be introducing at the ASRL Open
this next season will be the Course Manager and our own carnival
committee. Both these initiatives are still a work in progress at
committee level but we will announce them in plenty of time for all to
understand before the next Open.
Three new developments announced at the AGM were:
1. The introduction of the ASRL Coaching Panel. We have committed
to running at least 3 coaching weekends this year hopefully prior to
Xmas. This coaching panel will hopefully be available to visit our most
needy spots first offering a free weekend of coaching for all boat
rowers regardless of their financial membership of the ASRL
-
We are now calling for our experienced boat sweeps to step
forward and offer some of your time so we can build a register of
available coaches.
-
We want coaches who can cater for both Sweeps and Rowers, but as
a coach you don’t necessarily need to be able to cover both skills, you
can be linked with another coach to cover the part you miss
-
We will be launching this off the back of the new Coaching DVD
produced by Scott Tannahill with the assistance of SLSA, ASRL and
several leading sweeps plus the generous financial support of SLSA
-
We also invite the smaller States and regional areas in the
bigger States to apply for assistance from this panel. We will close off
the first round of requests for a visiting Coaching Coarse on the 20
August.
-
To register please provide your intended location, an idea of
the number of attendees and a list of available dates. If we receive an
excess of requests we will be making our selection as to where we hold
the first courses based on the information provided
2. The second announcement was that we would be doing everything
we could to build on the success of the Colloroy Young Guns. We don’t
want to do anything to undermine this great initiative at Colloroy but
in year one we will be looking to repeat the event in each State and to
see what we can build from there.
3. The ongoing discussion between the ASRL and SLSA re the
formation of a National Boat Commission that would be the pinnacle
advisory body to SLSA on all issues to do with surfboats. We provided a
briefing to those present at the AGM on our progress and advised that we
would be meeting with SLSA in Sydney on Friday 16 July to further
discuss and move this issue forward. The Boat Commission has some very
positive outcomes for our part of the sport so we are excited to be in
continuing talk with SLS on this issue.
Members are advised that we are presently looking at the chat forum.
We don’t want to block the good interaction that happens on it but we do
want to stop the silly interaction that either causes some individuals
pain or exposes embarrassment to us in front of our sponsors. Access to
the website will be tied to your membership as it sits on our database.
Do the right thing, by all means question if you want and you will have
no access issues. The only issues will be around the flaunting of the
Web user Rules which are posted for all to see. This tightening of
policy is all about protecting the image of the ASRL.
Members are reminded that in every case they should contact the ASRL
Secretary with any and all questions to the committee. Please get your
response on the Matrix, Coaches willing to assist and application to
hold a coaching weekend in your area back to the Secretary by the
appointed time. From this season onward your enquiry will be logged by
the Secretary so please use this email as your entry point;
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Enjoying the cold Canberra winter
Bert Hunt
President ASRL
|
