Dear Football South Members,

I wanted to update you on a few personnel changes at Football South.

Our Media Officer, Holly Percival, recently returned to the UK after a year with Football South. Holly was offered an amazing opportunity to work for one of Europe’s premier sports journalism businesses, and that falls into dream-job territory. It’s great to see a staff member come to Football South, make a great impact, and then go onto something so high profile.

Above: Holly Percival (left) with Juan Pablo Angel and Julia Connor (Operations Manager) during last years FIFA visit

We had advertised for a replacement but following more insight into the post-covid funding situation we have decided to hold on replacing this role until the situation is clearer in a few months.

In the meantime, Olivia has been an Operations Intern at Football South for a little while and will been picking up the media duties until the end of the community football season.

On July 16^th we’ll be incredibly sad to see Conor O’Keeffe head back to Ireland for both personal and football reasons. It’s impossible to put into words Conor’s contribution to both Football South and Southern United over his 4 years in New Zealand – he’s someone that will be missed by our entire team and the many kids he’s coached or delivered programmes to. Conor is a real leader and standard setter for our Federation, and has been crucial in the positive change we’ve gone through in the last 5 years.

 

 

Above: Conor O'Keeffe leading Southern United to victory against rivals Canterbury earlier this year

In terms of replacing Conor, we’ll look to utilise existing community coaches to support our technical team through term 3. The Southern United academy will continue as planned with FDO's Danny Ledwith & Stephen Last taking Conor’s management role of the programme.

I can also confirm that we are holding off recruitment for the Football Development Manager / Head Coach role, vacated by Paul O’Reilly in February. We’ll make a decision on this pending information around the 2020 and beyond plans for the ISPS Handa Premiership, which should become clear in the next two weeks. 

Our Southern United assistant coach, Stevie Lawless, will also head back to Europe at the same time. Stevie was an incredible assistant coach, player, and provided great S&C support to local players and clubs.

Finally, our Competitions Manager – Garbhan Coughlan – will be finishing at the end of the season. Garbhan had planned to move to Christchurch with his partner around Easter and we’d advertised his role to ensure good continuity. However, with Covid-19 impacting, we paused recruitment and Garbhan has stayed on for the season. We expect to recruit for this role towards the end of the year and appreciate Garbhan staying on in the meantime. 

Above: Garbhan Coughland (right) with Football Development Officer Danny Ledwith

Garbhan has been with us for 3 years and as well as managing our competitions and events, he’s been an active coach across our programmes. His contribution to Southern United over three seasons has been huge – his overall impact along with his goals to games ratio has been nothing short of spectacular.

Whilst Covid-19 has impacted our business, our staff changes are not related to the financial situation or a need to downsize. Like many organisations we have been hit hard, but we are stable and will get through the year OK. Our decision to delay recruitment of these roles are to support this and provide further security for existing staff. 

Our team continue to work incredibly hard and have handled the lockdown period with huge integrity and understanding. We all only recently returned to full pay and hours, and I’d like to publicly thank all our staff for their personal sacrifice over the last 4 months.

At this point we’re not planning for any further role changes, covid-19 related or otherwise. You can find contact details for all our staff via the ‘Contact Us’ page on our website.

Thanks again to all our members for your continued passion, support and hard work – especially during these tough times.

Chris Wright | CEO Football South

Photography: Adam Binns