Head Coach’s Report 2007-08
Development
The challenge for a small club with limited space and time is to cater for everyone’s needs:
- Individual players with varying experience and ability (from beginner to NVL level)
- Developing 3 teams (especially when a match is approaching).
The year we trialled 3-hour sessions, allowing two different groups
to train each Sunday. From my perspective this was a success: we
catered for more people and teams (see table below), kept more new
faces, and members were generally positive.
|
Focus:
|
Everyone
|
A-team
|
B-team
|
Ladies
|
Juniors
|
|
Number of training sessions:
|
13
|
12
|
11
|
3
|
3
|
Taking these training sessions together various competitions plus
the summer fun sessions on sand and grass (not to mention the tour of
Italy!), I believe we offer our members a very good deal. I am very
grateful to the many people who helped to organise and coach all this
activity! I’m always pleased to receive feedback and ideas (and
volunteers) to help us keep improving.
Some of our members play higher level competition with Mavericks
(men and women), who are now moving up to NVL. This will stretch their
commitment, and some may spend less time with our club. As our club is
the largest contributor to Mavericks (men), I would like to think that
one day we might have our own NVL team – that way we would keep the
expertise in our club and cater for an even wider range of
members. However it would require greater financial and organisational
commitment than we currently invest.
Each year we should ask what kind of club we want to be?
Performance
The B-team achieved some stability this year - they were a delight to watch and improved through the season to finish 3rd
in Div 1. To prove it was no fluke, they reached the final (for the
second year running) of the end-of-season tournament B-division. Many
thanks to Irwin for all his dedication as coach.
The A-team narrowly lost two early league games and were just squeezed into 2nd
place in the Premier League. A convincing revenge win over the
champions took us to the cup final, which unfortunately was postponed to
next season! The A-team welcomed 4 new members this year, so I was very
pleased to achieve high standards while developing a new squad.
Sadly the women’s league was erratically organised and we couldn’t
often field our full squad or even a team to defend our titles. I was
pleased with the performances when we did play, and we welcomed some new
players who certainly improved, so I’m hoping we have lots of fun and
good results next year.
For a small club with limited resources, it’s been a good season!
Phil Heads, 26th June 2008