First Division - Eastern Football League

Womens Umpire Liaison Officer
It is pleasing to announce that the EFL has become the first
league in the country to appoint a specific person to work with
our female umpires in the position of Women’s Umpire Liaison
Officer. Holly Anderson has been appointed to this position.
Holly will be involved in ‘mentoring’ new female umpires and
also providing a conduit between the umpires board and all
female umpires. She will also be involved in the development of
recruitment and retention initiatives for female umpires.
8. Report on the findings of the JAFSS study
As you would be aware, the Eastern Football League in
conjunction with the University of New South Wales and
Monash University conducted a study into the incidence of injury
resulting from the participation of children in Australian football.
The final report of the findings from the Junior Australian
Football Safety Study (JAFSS) study have been recently been
released.
It is interesting to note that the overall findings of the report were
that it confirmed the relatively low rate of injuries in junior
Australian football – this is something that we need to keep in
mind in our promotion of junior football and the safety thereof.
9. Knox CC – Event management plans
The Knox CC has indicated that all clubs who will be hosting
finals (senior or junior within the City of Knox) will be required
to lodge event management plans this year and looking forward,
all clubs in the municipality will be required to lodge plans for all
home and away games from the commencement of season 2006
(the one plan would cover all games at that ground).
After many meetings between that council and the league to
refine the process, the clubs hosting finals have been presented
with the relevant documentation and the process is underway.
It is hoped that this process might well produce a ‘template’ that
future club committees can use to quickly inform them of the
requirements of conducting both home and away and finals series
matches.
10. Ladies of the East
Contained in our current strategic implementation plan, are the
following two strategies: (to) “Implement
processes/opportunities that will provide a positive feedback to
EFL participants”; and, to “Design and implement policies aimed
at improving the standard and efficiencies of all EFL officials”.
To this end, a decision was taken to see what initiatives could be
implemented that might assist in the promotion of females into
administrative roles with our clubs and following some
preliminary meetings, the first function for our LOTE (ladies of
the east) group was held on Thursday 9 June.
The function, with over 70 ladies in attendance, was hosted by
Beverley O’Connor, who did a terrific job and the keynote
speakers were Chris Dowling and Margaret Trollop.
I am confident that those in attendance had a very nice evening,
however, the actual success of the night can only be measured in
what the ladies do to take their group forward.
All clubs should be take note of this group and keep an eye out
for future events and encourage those ladies involved in your
club to get involved.
11. ATO tax ruling
The league has commissioned our auditors to apply for a tax
ruling on behalf of our clubs to seek an exemption (for all but the
highly paid players) from the requirements of remitting PAYG
tax and providing group certificates.
We have done this in an effort to ease the workload on the
treasurers and hopefully, will make playing football a little more
attractive financially for the players. Further information will be
forwarded directly to clubs as it comes to hand.
12. Implications to the rules of the league arising from the
recent investigations
It is commonly acknowledged that with the evolution of society,
there is an increased propensity for people to challenge rules.
Unfortunately, as we address new and varied issues as they arise,
we discover that there are inadequacies, anomalies or
inconsistencies in our rules and procedures to address the issues.
Therefore, it is necessary to seek considerable legal advice in
order to frame the required rules to address the above and this
will come at a cost – hopefully however, the result will be clearer
rules that are more relevant to today’s world.
13. Website traffic
We have been experiencing a noticeable increase in interest in
advertising on our website. I have no doubt that we are
registering on most web traffic monitoring services.
Our web traffic is recorded over two servers – our main page,
forum, tribunal etc is on one server and the results, fixtures,
ladders and transfers all reside on another server. Both servers
register about the same amount of traffic on a daily/monthly
basis.
The highest amount of traffic that we had ever received occurred
in August and September of last year when we were registering
approx 12,000 pages PER DAY downloaded from the “EFL site”.
In the months of April and May of 2005, we have been
registering approx 26,000 pages (on average) downloaded per
day ON EACH SERVER – twice the traffic of our previous high
from one server.
Indeed, we have now clocked over 200 million hits on our two
servers and we have had approx 9 million to 10 million pages
downloaded in the past year.
While these numbers are particularly impressive, they have a
significant impact financially as we eat into the available
bandwidth and incur additional expense to access additional
bandwith.
14. Meeting of all league managers at EFL House
In a first for community football, a meeting of all metropolitan
and country league managers at was held at EFL House on Friday
22 April.
Those in attendance at the meeting discussed a myriad of issues
affecting all leagues and clubs and looked at the future planning
of programs and resources to assist in the development of
football. It was great to see that leagues can come together and
work cooperatively for the benefit of football.
15. Under 15 Team win Metropolitan Championship
Finally, it is very pleasing to note that our under 15 representative
team took out the Metropolitan Championship last Saturday
establishing our boys as the best group of under 15 footballers in
Melbourne – special congratulations go to Alex Fiore (Knox FC)
who was named best on ground in the grand final and to all of our
boys on a job well done!
I would like to close this edition with an acknowledgement of all
of our sponsors – without them the cost of competing in the EFL
would be much higher. I wish all clubs every success as we
approach the finals series – but remember – at the end of the day
we play the game for enjoyment!