Doing Some Duty

I noticed recently on the South Australian website that all their league draws include a "duty team".

Given the load League Directors and Captains are bearing (particularly as our leagues continue to grow), I wonder if we should consider something like this in Brisbane.

The idea is that at the start of each season, teams must nominate a minimum of two of their players to be the duty team – so people know their responsibility well in advance. If for some reason and individual's plans change, they can get another team member to take care of it.

Importantly, competition points lost when a duty team doesn't do its job right, which makes for a good motivator.

Each week, the duty team gets keys and so on from the previous week's duty team and arrives early to turn on lights, set up fields and scoreboards, pass scoresheets out to Captains and such.

In Adelaide they have regular clubhouse access, so the duty team then opens a little shop for cold and hot drinks and sausage rolls and stuff while games are on – as you can imagine this makes for a very social atmosphere (we don't have that access here yet, but we *could* do something like this if we wanted to – look at the post-BPL esky that happens sometimes – and we now have some lockable space to leave things at Annerley). At the very least there'd be an easy place to sell discs!

At the end of the night, the duty team collects all the scores and collates and emails them to the LD the next day, along with keeping the shop open for bit. Meanwhile, next week's duty team picks up the cones and such and gets the keys for the following week. (The LD hangs onto a separate set of keys, just in case).
Where a League has a bye, then the team on the bye provides the duty team, but if there's no bye then in Adelaide with their shop, teams sit a couple of players out to man it (for a half I think – and then rotate some others off).

While we're now well on the way to teams paying fees collectively, if for some reason we went back to individuals paying fees, then for the first two or three weeks of the season you'd have two lots of duty teams on duty – one doing the stuff described above, but the other providing a fee payment desk (with LD support).