What do I do?
by Dawn Mertens

I mainly split my time between three areas that form part of the Tournaments Department.

Competitions – I compile the entry forms and promotional material for all the events, and type all the updates to the event programmes and regulations, sending supplies of these to all EBU events. I also collate all the responses to the Tournament Review forms, which players fill in at events and report these to the Tournament Committee. I keep track of all the trophies, and ensure that they are recalled, engraved, polished and occasionally repaired and arrive at each event. I set up the event booking system on our membership database for each event and help Peter Jordan with taking telephone entries, and dealing with postal entries. You may have met me working on the congress reception desk at Brighton and occasionally at the London Year End and Easter events.

Internationals – I make the entries for all our teams participating in international events and for the Open, Women’s and Junior teams, book all of their accommodation and for the overseas events book flights or eurostar tickets (after researching the cheapest alternatives). All players are provided with polo shirts as a playing uniform for home internationals and for major internationals an official uniform is also required for the opening and closing ceremonies. I order in stocks of the three lions polo shirts and advise on suppliers to purchase the official uniform. This year has been a particularly busy one (and a successful one) as apart from the regular annual events such as the White House junior event in Amsterdam we have also had the European Teams in Dublin, the World Youth Bridge Teams in Tang Cai, and the World Mind Sport Games in Lille. I also order uniform for our TD’s; shirts with the EBU logo and wine colored jackets.

Licensing – Counties, clubs, leagues and commercial organizations apply to me to license events, be they Green Point, the new Blue Point, Swiss, charity or holiday events. I issue the licenses, list the events on the competitions calendar and used to have to manually invoice and keep accounts. With the advent of P2P invoices are now automatically generated and in these cases I just have to check that the correct P2P codes have been used. Some organizations have unfortunately yet to get to grips with the new technology so invoices still have to be raised for these leagues and holiday events.

In addition to this I am Secretary to the Selection Committee, which ties in quite nicely with the Internationals work, and also to the Tournament Director Development Group – both of which involve issuing agendas, attending meetings and taking minutes, dealing with any actions arising and keeping up to date records.

There is no typical day in the office as my priorities tend to vary depending on what events are coming up.

Previous articles:

Gordon Rainsford
Gill Pain
Peter Jordan