Member Services Director Report 2009 Vancouver Island

With a few exceptions I am pleased with how the 2009 season went. We put a good product on the field and we were able to supply officials for all scheduled games. I was pleased with the improvements made by many of our officials both in mechanics as well as in rule knowledge.

However I have some real concerns about the 2010 season and our ability to man all games. We had 25 working officials for the 2009 season doing 140 games, which breaks down to 609 slots to be filled. This made for a very busy schedule for many of our officials. For the 2010 season we have 6 officials who will have there availability curtailed for various reasons. Recruitment is an absolute priority for us to be able to live up to our contract with high school and community football on Vancouver Island.

 Last year I stated that recruitment of north island officials was the priority for 2009, however despite efforts made through numerous avenues we were unable to pick up any new officials in this region. I now believe that recruitment must be a priority everywhere on the island and we will have to rely on officials traveling into northern communities. This concerns me from the standpoint of travel cost being passed on to the schools but we don’t seem to have any choice if we are to staff the north island games. We currently have 7 officials who reside north of Nanaimo and 3 of these officials are considering taking next year off.   

I feel that every official on the island has to take an active part in the recruitment of new officials for the 2010 season. If you know some one that you think would make a good official give them my name and number, or pass their name on to me, I will follow up and put the wheels in motion to get them trained. We need to get started on this as soon as possible in order to be prepared for the start of the 2010 season.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the officials on Vancouver Island who went above and beyond in order to put crews on all games, and specials thanks to Mike Gatto the island allocator for his hard work under some pretty stressful situations making sure all games were staffed.



Thank-you Erich Wahl
Member Services Director
Vancouver Island