Tutty outlines his progress Operations manager report

WICKLOW GAA’S operations manager Dave Tutty attended last Monday’s County Board meeting in Ballinakill after delegates wondered at previous meetings about the progress and impact of the new role within the county.

County Chairman Martin Coleman called on the Hollywood man to address the meeting.

“I’m not sure if there was anything in particular that any of ye wanted to address but here’s just a brief run down on what’s been going on, on a structural side of things for the last six months,” began Dave Tutty.

“In Ballinakill here, one of my roles is that I’ve taken over from the development committee so there’s the day to day running of the facilities and we’ve had a number of issues ongoing for the last couple of months. We’ve had trouble with the waste water treatment plant, our water heating plant, they were all unoperational at certain stages over the last couple of months. We’ve all of that cleared up and working up to last week when the lift pump for our well failed. This is kind of indicative of what’s been going on. There’s been a lot of niggly issues going on with the building and facilities over the last couple of months.

“With regard to pitches I think everyone is well aware of the problems we’ve had over the last couple of months with the pitches and the quality. We’ve seen a big improvement over the last couple of months. We’ve got into more of a routine of scheduled maintenance and we’re mowing and marking out more regularly and we’re just getting things covered quicker. We carried out a lot of work on pitch 4. We’ve drained and sanded the whole area, we’ve fertilised and I think we’re really seeing benefits there.

“Leading on from that, in July we drew up a planned schedule for routine maintenance and that was submitted to management and was approved and last month we went out to tender for a maintenance contractor to take over the routine maintenance of the whole facility on an ongoing basis.

“We’ve appointed a contractor today and that contractor will be responsible for the vertical draining and sanding of the pitches twice yearly, the weed killing twice yearly, the fertilising and the mowing on an ongoing basis and that will free up our own staff to finish things that are half done or not been done or that have been forgotten about over the years. So we hope to see a marked improvement in the facility in general over the next four to six months.

“With regard to coaching and games I work very closely with the games manager and the GDAs with regard to games development and coaching around the county. We’ve seen a number of changes there. We lost Leighton a few months ago and we’ve replaced him with Jonathan Tallon who is solely a hurling GDA so we’re trying to blend Jonathan in. We’ve been very busy for the last couple of months with Cúl Camps but we’re back into the swing of things, we’re back out with clubs and we’re starting to roll out our Cumann na mBunscol programme so if anyone has any issues with coaching and games development or if they haven’t seen any improvement in any area on that side of things they can just give me a shout here in Ballinakill.

“Coming out of the coaching and games development we feel that there might be an opportunity to change the calendar for the underage and youth competitions in the county so we will be putting together a proposal for change to the calendar of fixtures next year to more closely incorporate the development squads and the Leinster blitzes and the underage games and coaching in the county.

“With regard to commercial I’ve been busy over the last couple of months with commercial activity. I’ve been dealing a lot with of out existing and potentially new sponsors for 2017. I can’t go into too much detail at the moment but we have a couple of opportunities out there that are quite exciting with regard to sponsorship of teams, competitions, naming rights of premises, some of our underage activities. We’re at advanced stages with a couple of those. We’ll keep you informed as it happens.

“With regard to the structural side we’re developing our strategic plan for 2017 to 2021. We’ve a sub committee looking at that. I sit on that and coordinate that so we hope to have that out by the end of the year. That will detail what we want to do for the next five years in the county and set goals and targets. We’re also developing an operations and facility management plan for Ballinakill. Some of the activities here have been a little ad hoc and we want to tie those down.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months. We’ll also have a proposal for finance in the next couple of months with regard to a vehicle to deal with sponsors in the county to maximise our brand across and outside the county and try to maximise our revenue generation.

So, that’s kind of a summary of where we are and what we’ve been doing do if anyone has any questions we can take them or if anyone w33ants to call me or email me there’s no problem.

Avondale’s Brendan Bray asked: “Can you name the contractor?”

“It’s Damien Kennedy Contractor,” replied Tutty. “We shortlisted seven contractors who we thought were local enough to do the work at short notice”.

Daniel English from Eire Og Greystones asked Dave Tutty if he had a round estimate as to how much revenue the County Board were expecting to raise from sponsorship in the next 12 months.

“At the moment in 2015/2016, overall we are generating about €50,000 from commercial activity. I would hope to double that. I don’t think it will all be done this year. Whatever we do this year I don’t want to get tied into that for the next five years. I want to be able to change that. There may well be areas where we go forward with no sponsorship if we think the right sponsor is not there or at the right level, we won’t settle for €1,000 when we could get €5,000. We’re at a very low level coming in; hopefully it can only get better.

Aughrim’s Des Burton said that as a county, Wicklow had to be realistic when it comes to sponsorship and he wondered if naming rights was a potential earner for the county.

“In my opinion, if I can get money for it and if it’s acceptable by management and by the County Board then I’ll go for it. There are certain things we need to look into but as far as I’m concerned if it brings money into the county and supports the games then by all means,” he added.

Avondale’s Brendan Brady wondered if Dave Tutty’s plan for visiting clubs would be getting underway.

“You initially said you would visit the clubs. When do you think you will get that going?” he asked.

“I’ve contacted every club in the county, Brendan,” replied Dave. “I’ve emailed every club. I’ve visited quite a few that got back to me but a lot of them haven’t got back to me,” he added.

“Your role here seems to be more hands on, fixing things that are broken, is that how you see yourself?” continued Brendan Brady.

“No, not necessarily. I hope to get to a situation where we have all these problems ironed out and we can move on to do other stuff but at the moment with the facility in Ballinakill is a resource we need to have working at its best and it’s not at the moment.

“I think everyone here would agree that you drive in and it’s Ballinakill but at the moment we don’t see it as a centre of excellence, it’s certainly not excellent. There’s a lot of work left to be done, there’s a lot of structural work left to be done, investment is still needed. But even with what we have I don’t think we present it in the best light, there’s a lot of work left to be done and we can get that done reasonably quickly and once that’s done,” said Dave Tutty.