Never said I had a problem with the current fee structure. Im more than happy to pay the new fees.
Why has league bowling numbers dropped off over the last 5-10 years.
Mainly the cost factor. And you want to charge people another $45 a year per league. Gee I thought it was only the centres trying to kill off league bowling to allow more lanes for social bowling.
What i object to is having to pay $135.00 a year if I bowled 3 leagues a week and getting nothing in return. Id rather pay the $27.50 for nothing in return.
Hows that for negativity.
Robert
YOU are exactly the type of person who will benefit. With respect, IF you read the post again properly, right from the start - you will see where.
You have been a great representative of SA for many years at national level, and no doubt, a lot of it at your own expense. Rachuig roll-offs, Rachuig practice, your own individual cost of "Nationals" to represent your state.
A lot of this new income is going to 3 areas as has been mentioned before
a) promoting the game
b)
training for representative bowlers
c)
travel and accommodation for representative bowlers
As Jason mentioned earlier, the distribution is the same as the government system. State bodies put in a request to TBA for funding for their respective Rachuig trial and practice costs commensurate with the number of bowlers involved.
Imagine this
very much understated scenario people........30,000 people pay $1.00 per series, a lot bowling twice or more per week, but let's average it out at 1.5. Therefore, the TBA has received $45,000.00 per week over 40 weeks, totally $1.8m. Overheads may increase slightly so far as wages and office etc for administering this, let's say $80,000.00 in related expenses. Considering in 2007 the TBA received only $347049.00, it means they are $1,372931.00 ahead in member registrations. A good figure to put aside for promotion of the game would be say $500,000.00, leaving a
MASSIVE $872931.00 for you guessed it -
representative training, travel & accommodation.
Just imagine if TBA paid the lineage etc for Rachuig practice, roll-offs and competition and subsidised every team member $1000.00 towards their accommodation and travel etc. Allowing for 200 bowlers and officials, we still have close to $600,000.00 left for training of all age groups at the elite level & for International representation.
On another note.......I have spoken to several bowlers on the $1.00 matter, and everyone has said that amount wouldn't bother them in the least, while they might jokingly b*tch about it for a week or two, soon be all forgotten. Need to think about this too...the bowlers who are not members of forums like this one would have absolutely no idea what the structure is.....and they wouldn't care. If they were simply told 'series rates' were going up a dollar for association admin fees, but they don't have to pay $20.00 odd in one hit at any stage for the year.......very few people, if anyone would complain. BUT people will not be happy paying as much as $55.00 in one hit, and recruiting new league bowlers who have to part with that kind of money the first or second week into the sport - will be even harder. However, most newbies would not care or even be interested about $1.00 of their weekly series cost going to the TBA, in fact as with all other sports, they would expect the association to have a fee.......
This really is a 'no brainer' folks, if we don't as a group back our governing body and yet still make it very accountable - we will continue to have a game with declining numbers, a National team competition without some of the best bowlers, consequently maybe not the first choice options representing our country !!!