Table Tennis Wellington

Official notices have been sent out already but you may be interested to know that the 10th Annual General Meeting of Table Tennis Wellington is being held commencing 7:30pm at the Empire Table tennis Club stadium. Even if you are not a specific member or club delegate, you can attend as an observer. Also, there are spaces available on the executive committee so there is a chance you’ll be nominated!

Notwithstanding specific coaching roles or specific honorariums (accepted or otherwise), members of committees are unpaid and may work many hours, sometimes in between family crisis and imminent work deadlines! Next time you walk into a club or activity, consider how many people might have been involved along the way in bringing table tennis to you. That small amount of money you spend really goes a long way. In the overall scheme of things, any time or expertise you can provide over and above those dollars counts a great deal towards maintaining table tennis in our community.

Most work is done by people not on any specific committee. It’s not the task of any particular committee to attend to all your table tennis needs and desires, an association is only the sum of the things that we all create. For example, the reason why story X, Y or Z isn’t in this blog, is simply that no-one has sent it in, there is no Magical Blog Fairy™ flitting around from table to table gathering stories near and far.

A committee is a vehicle for planning and decision-making, followed by enabling the people and resources to execute specific projects. While a committee should ideally proportionately represent a range of interests, note that many (if not most) major activities happen externally to direct committee involvement, with perhaps only intermittent interaction if at all. To clarify what I mean, here are some examples:

1. Someone of their own accord organises entries and car-pooling for people interested in travelling to a tournament together.
   
2. Clubs themselves operate independently from each other and at least mostly independently from the TTW at the association level.
   
3. Your local sports shop that advertises and sells table tennis equipment is a separate process with essentially no connection to any club, association, or national sports body or committee. Arguably, the greatest force for promoting table tennis in New Zealand overall is Rebel Sports.
   

At the end of the day, we are all better off if everyone working on a community project is doing something they enjoy and in an area they are interested in. Maybe there is some project that you may be interested in, that you would like to run or be a part of, you can get on a club or association committee or not even be on a committee at all but just talk with your committee to see how your project can dovetail nicely with everything else that is going on.