By Audley Boyd, Assistant Sport EditorBOARD MEMBERS of the Jamaica Hockey Federation (JHF) will knock heads at its Mona headquarters this evening to chart the way forward.
Its main path is entrenched in a constitutional amendment for which a Review Committee was established at last November's Annual General Meeting (AGM) to look at the possibilities.
"Tomorrow's meeting will be about how to get that committee working so that they can deliver their recommendations by the end of February. We expect that after this we'll be a much stronger organisation," JHF interim president Jerome Miles told The Gleaner in an interview yesterday.
Miles announced his resignation due to work commitments last November when elections should have been held at its AGM, but that process was deferred until next month in the face of unresolved problems that are to be tackled by the Review Committee.
The major part of their mandate, according to Miles, is " ... to review the constitution and the by-laws of the federation, the governance structure, the composition of committees and to look at the fees that we charge to the clubs ... we have serious problems with that."
It amounts to $7,500 and Miles says it is not enough.
The committee is due to start working on its recommendations next week and among other things, vice-president Audrey Gaynor says " ... we'll be looking at our constitution to see how we can make it work better for us."
She argues that the current constitution is counter-productive.
"The real issue is not about the men and the women. It is about those things in the constitution that have created a gender bias (such as the five-four ratio) where you don't necessarily have the best people serving the sport," Gaynor said.
Only five members of the JHF's nine-member board can be of any one sex. Thus if five members of one sex are voted to fill the first five executive positions, the next four members must be of the opposite sex even if members of the other sex are better suited for any other available position.
The tone for this meeting was set at the year-end forum where the sharp differences between the once separated but now unified male and female executive body which runs the sport were brought to the fore in a most forthright manner.
"The biggest thing is to charter the development path," Gaynor said. "There's no one thing that is going to suit both men and women ... there's a difference in how we charter our development path."
Men wanting to play full-sized competitions at an introductory stage as opposed to the women wanting to use smaller sized games at the novice level, is but one example depicted by Gaynor, who added that there are "merits of both" given the superior athleticism of males at an earlier stage.
A huge part of the problem, they say, is how the sport is run.
"It is a fully voluntary thing. A lot of them (executives) are managers, they have families, their jobs are so that their time is limited. We're one of the few sports that we have to run everyday," admitted Miles.
Gaynor agrees: "One of our big problems is the 100 per cent volunteerism. It takes a toll on people. You can't administer a sport on full-time volunteerism."
They even run the facility where they will be meeting later.
The men and women's bodies operated as single entities for almost 60 years before being forced to merge by the International Hockey Federation (FIH) in 1998.
"It's barely five years since the marriage," Gaynor said. "We're finding out the problems but we're looking to work out these kinks ... so that the sport can move forward."
