Esteemed Wombats! Various factors have prompted me to pump out a spiel of some sort in this section of the (soon to be replaced) website. First of all, the state of our team and its achievements on the playing field. Since the low of only a couple of seasons ago when we regularly struggled to get 11 blokes on the field, we have seen a great turnaround in player numbers thanks to some excellent new recruits to the club. We now regularly have 14 or 15 people putting up their hands to play each game, which is fantastic. On top of that, a total of 25 players have been registered with the JCA and played at least one game this year – which is certain proof of our revival and player depth.
For those that have only played a game or two despite stating your availability for most games, we are very grateful for your dedication and urge you to keep doing so, as your time will come! We have a couple of potential friendly matches in the works – so definitely keep an eye out for those. To those silent lurkers on the mailing list – please introduce yourselves if you can and put your name forward when we are calling for availability. Even if you haven’t played with us yet – just come along and get to know us and drink beer on the sidelines! All in all – it’s been a great effort so far this season in both the JCL and Japan Cup. Although we fell short in the Japan Cup semi final, we have the more important JCL final campaign looming in September/October! As Zulu would say…”time to open a can whoop-ass”…or something like that.
An other major development in 2014 is the securing of a new major sponsor! After many years of sponsorship from Hardys wines, we eventually found ourselves without that sponsorship deal due to Hardys being distributed by a new firm in Japan. This happened in the background and we were not informed of such developments and as a result, we lost contact with the person we had dealt with over the last few years. Nevertheless, we put out the feelers for sponsorship options and one of our members introduced us to a person at the distributor of Jacobs Creek and Wyndham Estate wines. The distributor was keen to have us on board and provide brand exposure to their wines in Japan and also gave us the choice of using either brand as our sponsor. We decided to take the latter, Wyndham Estate, considering that the Tokyo based Australian Rules football club, the Goannas (the very club the Wombats were born out of) is already sponsored by Jacobs Creek. So, Wyndham Estate is officially our new sponsor, and we are very excited with the opportunity of utilizing their fantastic wines to raise money for the club and present bottles to players as a man of the match award after games. They have generously offered to provide us with around 15 boxes of wine a year…which should be plenty for us to use in our annual raffle and quiz night, plus some other activities in 2015. We look forward to a fruitful partnership with Wyndham Estate over the next few years.
This website on which you are reading this now is long overdue for an upgrade. In fact, we are currently planning on designing a whole new look for tokyowombats.com. Something snappy, mobile device-friendly, easy to update and modern looking is what we have in mind. Hopefully we can get it up and running in early 2015. UPDATE: You are now reading this on the new website!!
A date has been set for our annual quiz night in 2014 – Saturday October 25! Hobgoblin in Akasaka will be the venue and hopefully some discounts on drinks will be available on the night. Start telling your friends and family now, as space is limited. Four people to a team – but no more than two Wombats on each team please. We have some fantastic prizes lined up, including wine from our new sponsor, Wyndham Estate, lots of other types of alcohol, shirts, caps, possibly some Aussie beef/lamb, a night’s accommodation for two people at Oakwood apartments, and maybe even a one day car rental coupon for a Lexus!? Evan and Jamie are already hard at work to come up with an entertaining set of questions to test our collective knowledge. Our annual raffle will also be drawn on that night…first prize will be two boxes (that’s 24 bottles!) of Wyndham Estate wines! 2nd prize will be one box, 3rd and 4th prizes will be half a box.
Anyway…that’s pretty much all for now. Thanks must go out to many blokes around the club doing good things, including Mick and Luke for their continued stewardship of the team kit bag, Luke for his advice on the new website and his introduction to Wyndham Estate, all the Wombats that have given up their own time this year to umpire other games in the JCL and Japan Cup leagues, and the blokes that have started to organize the quiz night and associated prizes.
Cheers,
Alex Koolhof – President