Jarvie – Mount Albert
“[Children] can teach us… well they often questions things in a way that we don’t always question things. So I think that it’s great to learn from them in that way. They don’t always take things for granted, whereas we adults can do. They seem to have open minds, which can be a good thing.
I came to New Zealand when I was five years old with my parents. So I’ve grown up in Auckland and I’ve lived here most of my life, and I currently work in sports. I organise badminton for children to adults; competitions and events and after school competitions. Although I don’t play the game, I don’t think I need to, but I just love my sports and we’re an organisation that’s not for profit, so we rely on some funding, but it’s a great game to play, and I just enjoy having people keep active, having a healthy lifestyle.
I love my sports and the idea with badminton is that it’s a game with a roof over our head, so no matter what the weather is we can still play, and it’s often a certain amount of time as well, which these days with people being time-poor, seems to be an ideal attraction to have a game that lasts an hour, an hour and a half, and I organise school competitions.
So every day at 3:30 schools play each other in Central Auckland. I’ve got five venues that I run, and a lot of children just seem to like playing sport, any sport, but there are some children that are at our venue every day practicing, and they’re really keen to become a professional or a make it their favourite sport, or get very good. So it’s a game for all ages, and I’m just there to encourage. Mostly people take up the game and take it a little bit further and we have coaches who look after the players if they’re showing a lot of promise and taken to a representative level.
I enjoy working in these organisations, obviously we have a very tight budget and we need funding to get us through, but I do enjoy that aspect of putting our efforts in to growing the game and making the game as good as possible, and although I have got budgets and forecasts to worry about I spend most of my time actually organising the game and not looking at figures all the time. Obviously the salary is as fair, but fortunately I have a partner who earns good money so I’m able to choose this employment of mine at the moment. I’m just keen to keep being involved in sports, and I previously worked with football, but badminton’s a great game to play as well.
It’s quick and fast, and that’s where I’ve been for a couple of years now. So the game of badminton, I think, was invented by the British a long time ago, but it’s really been picked up by the Asian community in a big way. So I think about 80 per cent of our people that play in our venue are of Asian descent, and so the game is growing just naturally with our immigration changes to Auckland.
So that’s a great thing, but people are happy to play against anybody in badminton. It seems like it doesn’t matter where you’re from, what your socio-economic background is, it’s a game for all, and I think it’s a great thing. Children from as young as seven can play the game, and we’ve got 90 year olds playing the game every day as well. Like I said, it’s not weather dependent. So it’s currently doing very well in Auckland.
In badminton there’s quite a few clubs around Auckland, but there’s a real casualisation of the game, so a lot of people now don’t belong to clubs. They just want to play the game. So we’ve reacted by having lots of groups, and we just have like a casual group where anybody can come along and play the game for a few dollars, and just play with other players who may be there each week, or may not be. I think about half our people that come into our stadium don’t belong to a club, and we need to reflect that, and so anybody can play the game once a year, once a day. It’s your choice, and because clubs are struggling like many other sports to keep their numbers up we need to reflect the changes in people’s attitudes with being more casual about all sports.
So at the end of 2006 I had a manufacturing company which I sold, and I did that for about 10 years, and it was quite a leap to sell it. It was quite tough managing the staff and growing the business, but I managed to take it somewhere, and I was looking for a change in direction, and I’ve always liked my sports, and I think my calling came too late to be a professional sports person in my middle ages, so I was keen to find a job I was passionate about, or more passionate about it, and sports was the answer. It didn’t have to be a sport I really played. So I’ve just spent the last 10-11 years working in three or four different sports, and I have a partner who works in a different field and she’s happy that I’m involved with the field I’m in now, because she’s happy and I’m happy that we’ve got jobs we’re both passionate about. They’re quite different, but I’ve chosen to work in the not for profit organisation field and I’m happy with my choice.”
