Orchard Heights Tennis Association - 2023 Annual General Meeting

Agenda, Motions & Member Support Votes

Orchard Heights Tennis Association’s 2023 Annual General Meeting

Minutes

The meeting began at 7 p.m. at Stonehooker Brewing Company. Motions are recorded on the agenda.

Item 1 Welcome, Meeting Format, Introductions, Attendance, Proxies
Elected members of the OHTA’s 2023 board of directors in attendance: President and IT Director Steve Planck, Membership Director Ojas Mehta and Treasurer Joanne Barrington. Secretary Gary O’Keefe was unable to attend.

Per City of Mississauga (City) requirements, the meeting followed formal meeting rules, including putting forth motions for member vote and support for each report received.

Our constitution requires 15 non-board-member club members be represented to achieve quorum. This was achieved with 19 non-board member attendees and 21 proxies.

Item: 2 Member Vote to Accept 2022 AGM Minute
The City requires members to review and vote to accept the previous year’s AGM minutes. 2022 AGM Minutes were emailed to all members after last season’s November AGM, as well as 21 days ahead of this AGM.

Likewise, Minutes from this meeting will be prepared and emailed to all members for review when they are done and ahead of next November’s AGM for review and approval. They will be sent to the City with our 2024 application to operate and are always posted on the club’s google website along with email addresses and our annual membership fees, https://sites.google.com/view/orchardheightstennisassoc. This tool is a city requirement, to help ensure transparent operation.

Item 3: Steve Planck, President’s Report

• There are no compliance issues with the City this year. The club operated smoothly.

• The plastic court tiles continue to degrade and are slowly damaging the court surface below them.

• Question to attendees - Keep tiles until they further degrade to impact general play, which is not the case yet, or get in the city queue asap to return the club to a true hard-court surface asap to help preserve the sub-surface and lower the cost of returning to hard courts?
• After a brief discussion, a quick show of hands revealed that a majority of members in attendance preferred hard courts.
• This conflicts with a 2022 google survey conducted where only 30% of 50 respondents rated the surface as below average.
• A city requirement for $$ to be considered requires a majority request from the membership.
• What to do with the surface will be explored in 2024 starting with a “Full Membership” vote during the membership registration process.

• We need to add a Maintenance Director who can recruit and organize a group of volunteers to clean the courts, lift and replace tiles as necessary and perform other spring and fall clean-ups.

Item 4: Ojas Mehta, Membership Director

• The new and renewal membership processes are completely online now and work well.
• 110 Adult and 25 Children/Junior memberships were sold this year.
• 28 fewer members than 2022, mainly because pickleball players left due to dissatisfaction with the plastic tiles.
• 84% of members were Mississauga residents.
• Adult lessons were run by a city-approved, provincially, and nationally certified tennis coaching organization. They were very well received and if there is interest, we’ll offer them again in 2024. Members will be informed how to sign up in the spring.

Item 5: Steve Planck, IT Director

• No issues or complaints with Court Reserve (CR) online booking and scheduled play management tool. Unanimous support to continue with SW application from all members in attendance.

• There is an excellent “Find a Player/Match feature” introduced in 2023 that will help new members find people to play with at their skill level.  Although not widely used in 2023 we will work to promote this again next season.
• Find a Match enables members to book a court using their own criteria, level of play, age, gender, etc., and then anyone who meets the criteria can register for that match. If a match is not fully meeting the criteria, with either two or four names, by a predetermined time prior to play, then the court time is automatically cancelled and made available for booking by all members.  

• Member asked how they find the players when the feature expects the players looking to play to look for openings versus the system emailing the players that meet the criteria to tell them of the opportunity.

• Scheduled Play

• Members want scheduled play; it’s why many join the club. Yet CR data show that scheduled play numbers are way down this year. We’ve designed it so CR takes care of the reservations with the onus on players to work together to make sure the events are utilized.  We are adding focus in 2024 on improving play by adding a board member to review changes in how we manage the events.
• CR shows Tues, Wed and Sat scheduled play was 75% utilized and Sunday, Monday & Thursdays only 40%.
• Repeat from 2022 - When scheduled players believed sessions had too wide a range of players, they stop playing rather than working it out themselves, as happened on Monday round-robins. We expected that players would split courts upon arrival to accommodate two distinct skill levels. Result - Women’s doubles replaced round-robins on Mondays.
• All players in scheduled groups must sign in for every session to ensure we have accurate usage data.

• Monday women moved from 7 to 6 p.m. start time in September and stopped registering for the scheduled play, this had minimal impact on the data as we only include June to September in the report?  For 2024 we will consider changing the session times for the fall if desired by the members

• We want to better utilize scheduled play and we’ll explore having captains for each scheduled session and perhaps offering ladder leagues to see the courts busier next year. Mark Orr will take the lead on boosting scheduled play in 2024.

• Question to Membership -- Are CR Global Announcements effective at informing players of CR features and scheduled play rules and changes? These were used this season and a quick show of hands revealed that few members used or know about this feature. We’ll address in 2024.
• For members to participate in some CR features, the “Rating” in the player profile must be populated. To assist players, we will Post Tennis Canada’s Self-Assessment guide and the club definition of the ratings on the bulletin board for members to self-assess and enter their playing level in their CR profile. This would be used for the Find a Match feature to help members meet and get to know more members as well as when considering players for different scheduled play events.

Item 6: Joane Barrington, 2023 Financials
The OHTA is incorporated, with a Dec 31 fiscal year-end, so we are unable to share 2023 financials at our AGM. The city requires us to submit our 2023 financials within 90 days of our AGM. As we did last year and likely will do in the future, our Treasurer will complete the financials early this winter and we’ll hold an Online Special Meeting for members to review and approve them for submission to the city.

Highlights

• Revenue is down vs 2022, with 28 fewer members.
• We are in the black and should be able to continue building a reserve fund for when the membership decides to replace the plastic tiles, which continue to degrade and are the reason pickleball is rarely played.

Item 7: Other Business

• Do we need more members to ensure full and suitably skilled players in all scheduled play slots?

• Consider for membership drive in 2024.

• Formalize a neighborhood membership drive, post flyers, or go door-to-door in the spring.
• Whenever a home is sold, leave a tennis club flier in the mailbox to welcome new residents
• OHHA typically receives tennis club queries and shares them with us

• OHHA newsletters always include a tennis club update and link to website/membership email

• Connect new members when they join with similarly skilled players – for example use “WhatsApp” chat to create groups.

• Robust conversation on scheduled play including changes made during the season.

• Running one two-hour session on both courts for Tuesday night mixed from 7 to 9 worked well.
• The changes to Wednesday from two @ 1.5-hour sessions to one @ 2-hour sessions were not well received.
• With CR automated, the onus is on the players to make sure others in the event are aware of openings for any given sessions – one player mentioned he does this regularly however there is no evidence of others doing the same – question for next year --- how to get more players to take ownership of their events to keep the slots utilized? – adding captains or chat groups were mentioned as possibilities.

Item 8: Nominees for 2023 Board of Directors  
Returning: Ojas Mehta (President), Gary O’Keefe (Secretary), Steve Planck (IT Director)

New: Lev Blynskiy (Treasurer), Mark Orr (Membership & Scheduled Play Director), Maria Swietorzecki (Vice-President)

Motion to recommend acceptance of the slate: Ian Alexander
Seconder: Alex Moy. Unanimous acceptance

Item 9: Meeting Adjourned at 8:30 p.m. and members stayed and socialized afterwards.