Woolly Thinking On £1 Fee

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31239, 10 December 1966, Page 17

Woolly Thinking On £1 Fee

(By Our Smimming Reporter)

The move that promises to be the salvation in swimming in New Zealand is still being regarded with suspicion, derision and even horror in some outposts of the aquatic sport in the Dominion. The institution of the £1 registration fee at the annual meeting of the New Zealand Amateur Swimming Association in October was made unanimously by the top administrators of the country’s 16 swimming centres—a clearcut backing of a commonsense scheme which will give the association’s council the confidence to plan realistically for the future.

It was proclaimed loudly at the time that the money to be obtained from the registrations would be used for the advancement of swimming at all levels. Strangely enough, many people have gained the impression that the big nest egg is to be expended solely on grand overseas tours by New Zealand teams.

Other people believe the association has no legal right to launch such a scheme without first testing the reaction of centres, while others feel that the fee will make swimming too costly a sport and will lead to a plummeting membership. The latest move in the spate of penny-pinching proclamations that has followed the institution of the fee is the South Canterbury centre’s desire to prepare a remit advocating the removal of the fee for presentation at next year’s annual meeting. The Press Association report of this development spoke of the announcement of the association’s intention causing an uproar at the Timaru meeting and a statement that the fee could mean the death of organised swimming in the district If this is an example of the thinking of centres in this matter, the national body might as well give up the struggle and turn the country’s 26,000 swimmers over to another sport. But the association will not do this, because it is fully aware that its responsibilities

do not end with the production of first-class competitive swimmers.

The aim of the association has always been the development of swimming In the widest sense—the equipping of every New Zealand child with the ability to enter the water in safety and to save a life if the occasion arises. This has been the ideal of the association since its earilest days in the 1890 s, and the balance struck between educational and competitive activities by the national body over the years has borne this out

The furtherance of this pattern is precisely what the registration fee is intended to do. It was an inspired move by the association—and full credit to the Otago centre and its spokesman, Mr K .R. Leckie, for selling it to the annual meeting—but some individuals still obstinately refuse to see it in this light. Mr W. V. Gazley, chairman of the Wellington centre, has asserted that the fee will price members out of the sport. How many other sports require an outlay as low as swimming, even with the registration fee thrown in? Two or three centres have challenged the right of the association to institute the registration fee without first consulting all the centres. A carefuly study of page 24 of the N.Z.A.S.A. rule book will quickly put their minds at rest on that point How people can read total expenditure on overseas tours into the statement that the fee will provide for the pursuance of swimming at all levels Is beyond comprehension.

For the last few years the council has scrimped and

saved to promote the sport, from the stepping-up of inward and outward tours at one end of the scale to the teaching of country children in tiny cold-water pools at the other. All these activities have been successful, but it is evident that in some quarters the association is regarded as a body that creates these splendid opportunities for international swimmer and learner alike without effort.

This, of course, is nonsense. The broad plan requires a considerable output of time and money. Time is given unselfishly by the hundreds of men and women who work for the good of swimming, but money is another matter.

The association has now reached a state where it must increase the tempo of its activities on all fronts if the spadework of the last decade is not to go for nought. To do this it requires a good deal of money—and it would be easy to guess the reaction of some centres to a national raffle, which was the only alternative offered at the annual meeting. For too long some centres have virtually regarded themselves as autonomous bodies with the national council as an annoying group of people in Christchurch. It is this attitude which spawns idiotic utterances such as those on the registration fee. Until all centres recognise themselves as part of a whole, and lift the level of their thoughts and actions to that of the council, the association will continue to stutter along. New Zealand swimming can afford to do this no longer.