Presidents Report - 2007-2008

As your President, I am pleased to once again present my report for the past year, a period of consolidation and not much forward progress.

On the whole it has been a quiet year for the club as we work towards our long-term goals. As usual, the night competition was very popular, attracting a large number of people who, through work and family commitments, would not normally be able to play pétanque.  This year for the first time we introduced medals and perennial plaques as well as the standard prizes for the winning teams, and this seemed to be well-received.

The group always enjoy themselves for the twelve weeks of the competition, and as you will see from the accounts, these evening games continue to be one of our main earners, thanks to a lot of hard work put in by a handful of dedicated members.

Again this year we hosted just one League round, but also the State Triples championships in April.  The heat wave in March unfortunately affected the League day, causing it to be postponed a fortnight, which played havoc with our Sunday social games, but at least this year we managed to avoid having a big event in the rain!

Our profile with SA Pétanque League has been very high this year, with nearly a third of our members joining up.  Several teams did very well over the year’s competition, with the result that AHPC finished the season in second place, an excellent result.

The biggest news of the moment is of course that after all the ups and downs last year about our future location, we can at last see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Negotiations with the Adelaide Hills Council and the Stirling Tennis Club finally produced the desired result of the latter agreeing to relinquish to us the area we currently occupy, as well as sufficient land to allow us to build our own clubrooms.   I was hoping that I would be able to announce today that the lease has now been signed and that our tenure is secure.  Unfortunately, the wheels of government move extremely slowly – as many of you no doubt know – and the proposal is on the agenda for Council approval this coming Tuesday.  Once approval has been received, and we don’t anticipate any difficulty obtaining that, surveys will be done, and the lease will be properly drawn up for us.  Regrettably our hope that we would be able to see physical progress this year was a bit optimistic, but with a bit of luck we will be in a position before the night competitions next year to operate from piste-side.

In the meantime we are doing what we can to prepare, so that as soon as we are able to, we will in a position to forge ahead.  I’m sure all members will be relieved and pleased when that time comes.

As always, I have had with me a very hard-working and supportive committee, and would like to thank them all for their contributions this year.

Brenton Key
President
30 June 2008