13 February 2025

Dear Captains and Players,

I hope your teams are enjoying the spring season.  In September I communicated three priorities; improve the committee volunteer pipeline, launch a new website and strengthen partner alliances.  I want to provide an update on these priorities and some operational items. 

We made significant progress on our volunteer pipeline.  We pulled in the recruiting timeline to the fall to improve transitions. We invited new members to the social and website subcommittees to increase league involvement and develop a conduit for future committee members.  As a result we are lucky to welcome Janet Chau (Darkside Angels) to our social subcommittee and Apiruedee Lo (HK Country Club) and Shaline Gnanalingam (You Got Served) to the website redesign subcommittee.  Kathleen Wong left the Treasurer role in December and I want to thank her for her service.  Please welcome Shaline as our new Treasurer, Lea-Anne Lee (Darkside Glory) as our incoming 2025-26 Registrar and Yasmin Wong (HK Country Club) as our 2025-26 Premier Division Rep.

HKLTL Secretary, Penny Austin and I lead the website redesign subcommittee and have contracted Blank Sheet for the redesign.  Penny also initiated the adoption of transferable Gmail accounts for all committee roles to ensure operational continuity.  Finally, to improve efficiency and our social media presence, we decided to end-of-life our Facebook group and consolidate our social media community on Instagram.  Please help by sending posts to your division representatives. 

I have not actively worked to further our partner relationships.  However, we continue to receive excellent support from existing partners and interest from new sponsors who believe in the purpose and appreciate the reach of our league.  The Christmas Tournament is an annual way to engage with the community and was a huge success this year.  The event brought our tennis community together and raised $60,000 for the Little Life Warrior Society. 

I also want to highlight a couple things related to daily operations.  In the captains meeting, I asked for a constructive approach to improving the league.  As a result, the committee received a very hot weather rule change proposal from the Discovery Bay Spin-off, Lioness, Net Assets, and Matrix captains.  Although the proposal was infeasible because it conflicted with public court rules, I applaud the DB captains for their solutions oriented proposal and thank them for their interest in improving the league.  Similarly, I received constructive feedback from a captain that rule 1.5, which requires that communication to the committee be brief and non-repetitive, was itself wordy and redundant.  We edited rules 1.5-1.6 for brevity and have updated the website. 

There are many more areas for improvement than resources so please contact the committee if you are interested in contributing.  I wish you all the best for the remainder of the season and look forward to seeing captains at our annual Captains' Cocktails next week.

Sincerely,
Nive Bailey