Quote Originally Posted by plague View Post
Excellent post.
Cheers for the feedback (am i right in that you are part of running a club?).
Club President.

Quote Originally Posted by plague View Post
Again, the SAP thing is an ever evolving beast. the clubs freely admit it. Hopefully they take on the Victorian changes, it can only be a good thing.
Has your club been slugged extra in your lighting costs yet? One of the massive increases over the past few seasons for inner city clubs has been a huge increase in the cost of maintaining and running their lights. we def have heard about clubs cutting back on training nights to save cash rather than bump up regos.
We are a Lake Macquarie club and pay the full electricity costs at the ground, so the lights are part of the power bill we get.

Our lights would run 5 nights a week during the season and at the moment, 2 nights a week during the off-season. The lights are in desperate need of maintenance, but that's a bit out of our budget at the moment. We are focusing on ground upgrades at the moment.

Quote Originally Posted by plague View Post
Also, yes, the coaching will be a massive problem. its ok for well intentioned mums and dads to run the kids around on a weeknight. and to be fair there are some legit good coaches teaching the kids out there. but yeah, if you want that to improve, and to be consistent across the board, coaches need to be trained. it costs money, and if you multiply that out and add it to the extra time needed to be invested by 'parents' wanting to coach, then does that deter more coaches than it encourages?

but yeah, the costs of grounds and coaches would have to come back to the rego. agree FFA/NNSW 'should' make it easier, but cmon, are they gonna go handing money back to the game?
We budget so we can allocate money to coaches to undertake coaching courses. The biggest issue is getting people to do courses. As much as money, I think time is an issue for parents.

Quote Originally Posted by plague View Post
just out of curiosity, does seeing the loss of juniors to a program like SAP make your club determined to be involved in SAP, or make you less interested in juniors knowing they might leave?
id assume both answers would be valid in certain circumstances, and hopefully if its the latter then something can be done to avoid it, because obviously thats the exact opposite of whats good for the game.
Personally, given the chance I would like to move towards SAP and have both elite and community teams.