Note from Capital Football re Cancellations

27 May 2010

Hi all,

It’s that time of the year again where it will be worthwhile informing parents and players the process around cancellations.

Firstly Capital Football doesn’t make decisions around cancellations lightly. Our preference like is to play as much football as possible.
Clearly the more cancellations and ground transfers, the more work that is required. Our aim is to try and manage the grounds right across the season, so that all senior grades play their 18 games and the juniors get to complete their leagues. Pressure on our grounds is immense even with no ground restrictions, that is every pitch is available, we have just enough grounds.

Capital Football can only make decisions based on the grounds given to us by the four councils. Friday afternoon we are advised what restrictions we have on various grounds.
Capital Football can play up to 6 games on a weekend on one pitch 2 juniors (12^th, 13^th, 14^th grades), 2 senior men and on Sunday 2 women’s games.

Last week it had rained Wednesday, Thursday and all day Friday. On Friday we received advice as follows for Hutt grounds:-
“We will be running with 1 game on each field for both days of the weekend(senior or junior), we have had a lot of rain over the week with the weekend still being quite cloudy with showers judging by weather forecast” and WCC 3 grounds closed, 8 grounds 1 game, all other grounds 2 games only.

Clearly there were going to be cancellations.  These were posted for both Seniors and Juniors on the website at 8pm Friday night so teams got as much notice as possible.
Even though Saturday was a great day weather wise Capital Football is not going to get any further grounds. What is more likely is that if it rains overnight Friday, more grounds are likely to be closed completely.

A point to note feedback received is that the WCC ground hotline differs from our cancellations. The correct source for football cancellations is our website or the radio. Grounds could be recorded as open on the hotline but as per above could have a number of restrictions.  Or they could be recorded as closed however, specific grounds have been kept open for us to play some games.

Last weekend faced with the restrictions Capital Football had to cancel Hutt Valley Juniors, a number of JPL, Promo, and Combined grades on Senior fields and 4 Senior Mens grades.
In addition, we were faced with 30 ground transfers for the Senior Mens grades.  These were posted on the website Friday night. Rather than have these read out on the radio Saturday morning, the broadcast referred to our Website. Unfortunately due to the huge amount of traffic the website crashed for about 45 minutes. The reason is that Capital Football received over 300,000 hits on Saturday morning. We are looking at ways of improving the website’s reliability and being able to take that amount of traffic.

So to this weekend. Expect significant cancellations! The following table may help explain:-

As you can see we have received this week a higher daily rainfall in one day, than for any day last year.

Already early indications are that a number of grounds will be closed and the others restricted to one game for the weekend.  
As advised above Capital Football won’t know until Friday afternoon what grounds are available and will endeavour to put on the website as early as possible Friday night what grades are cancelled and what ground transfers there will be.

Hope this helps.