Committee Meeting 12/05/2025
Participating: Amanda, Ignasi, Jacob, Jon, Nick, Simon, Sofie, Thierry and Zorn
Minutes by: Jon
Before we arrive, Jacob messages the committee that he will be late for the meeting. In the end 3 people are late, and 1 didn’t show up. I still only note down Jacob’s name, because no good deed goes unpunished.
Round table:
Zorn – Head of Men’s
Zorn feels like the men's team is going through a down slope, he call it - DIE UNTERGANG (the downfall).
There are currently more injured players than able bodied ones within the men's team. And due to our lack of players, some try to play even when they shouldn’t, making their injuries worse. Both Speed and FRK were punishing games for injuries.
For this reason we also have fewer players attending practice, which can be felt on the team spirit overall. It’s put its mark on the team mentally, which could be felt during this last weekend's game against Lund.
Ignasi goes through all the injured players in the team, which is long. His detailed re-telling of incidents is honestly impressive - maybe he should consider a career in theatre.
We have a good squad on paper, and if they were all playing we would be quite a strong team this year!
Realistically though, we won’t have our full strength back until after summer.
The Nordic Club Sevens tournament was held this past weekend at CSR. Zorn had not had a chance to appeal for the men's team to go cheer on our ladies playing, since he himself was unaware it was taking place till a few days before. He asks that we be better at sharing internally, when there are events we would like the whole team to partake in.
While at the event, he noted that alcohol free beer was served, which might be something we should start stocking for our home games, for spectators who don’t wish to drink sodas.
The committee agrees that this would be a good thing to have going forward.
Our players are slowly getting used to using Holdsport.
RD now requires the game day sheet to be completed on Holdsport, which is both nice - but also a little troublesome. The feature doesn’t work very well on a phone, so Zorn is required to do it the day before, or carry a laptop around on game day.
Signup for games is still on Facebook for a while, since that’s what our players are most comfortable with.
Both teams had a really fun trip home from Aarhus recently! Taking the bus with the ladies team is always a great social bonding event for everyone.
In our friendly against Lund last weekend, we loaned one player each from Speed and Wolves, both of whom reported having had a lot of fun on the trip with our team.
We have two games left before summer, and will soon learn what our game schedule will look like in the fall.
Zorn has cancelled a friendly against FRK, which was placed during Distortion, and we therefore very likely couldn’t field enough players for.
Coaches have asked for tackle bags, which Sofie will buy along with tackle mats, and a new big pump for the balls.
Cleaning of changing rooms. Zorn spent his Sunday cleaning our changing rooms. Seems DTU is not doing it anymore, so Jacob will bring this up with DTU.
We thank Zorn for spending his time doing this on his own accord.
Patri - Communication Secretary (written report)
It’s quite some work to do the lineup for Saturday games, when she only gets it 10pm on Friday evenings. We should do our best to get that to her earlier.
Our viewership on Instagram is doing well. The one doing best is one of Simon's face, he is therefore the new face of Exiles.
She hasn’t yet had time to look into the website, but will do so when merch is available.
Our rookie event is currently scheduled for September 27th, but this clashes with the women's world cup, which 12 of our ladies are going for. So she suggests we should do a Thursday special practice with BBQ.
Patri and Ignasi will coordinate about the event.
Sasha and Patri are also looking into arranging our Summer BBQ.
Patri has found a potential location for AD&D, and she wants Jon’s band back!
Somehow we end up spending 5 minutes talking about Jacob and Ela again. These meetings are turning into therapy sessions for Jacob.
Jacob – DTU Liaison
Jacob will have a meeting with Thor tomorrow, the Sports Manager.
They now arrange yearly meetings with the clubs, where they will go through the budget and plans for the year. Will raise the issue of our pitch with Thor there.
Jacob then mentions that he “Will arrange for getting our pitch sorted, as soon as we get a BBQ again”. The rest of the committee challenge Jacob’s idea that home games are only possible if there is a BBQ for after the game.
We’ll still look into getting a new BBQ though.
The DTU Club meeting went well. The big takeaway was that DTU sport will have their 50 year anniversary on the 12th of september. It's apparently going to be a glorified introweek, where each club needs some volunteers to do small practice sessions and advertise for the clubs. At the end there will be a BBQ for everyone. Jacob will get back to us on this when he knows more.
They will be using our pitch for the event..
Jacob asks for a favor - He asks if I will write that his “love life is doing great”. This is specifically written for Ela who reads these minutes - Hi Ela, nice of you to follow along!
Jacob will be applying for DTU funding, we can apply for up to 25k.
The application has to be targeted - ideas thrown out are New Kits, BBQ, Tacklebags, Slip’n’slide (Don’t think that last one will fly Amanda).
Jacob is wearing his hair in a top bun - it looks ridiculous.
Ignasi – Recruitment Secretary
29th of August is the date for this year's Intro Week. He’s notified the recruitment group to get ready..
Ignasi says he’s “joining the Zorn’s club” of pessimists (Zorn calls it Realists), with regards to whether people will actually do what they are asked to do. During the last recruitment event, Ignasi he had to ask at 4 different times, to get any guys to go to the event.
He’s hoping someone will pick up the torch and help recruit new people, because Ignasi is currently also focused on other things, like being a captain for the team.
Amanda is new to the committee and therefore much more optimistic about the future. She believes a Club Fair Package will help.
The committee got into a longer debate regarding the spirit of a team. What it takes to be a part of a team, an attitude you need.
Nick recalls how the team used to be a pyramid scheme, with each person having to find and recruit 2 other people, often whenever they ran into someone who spoke English on the street.
It is suggested that Ignasi appoints people and tells them to help out, instead of asking for volunteers.
Development games were a little confusing last year, but they are important so we should have more focus on them this year.
We have a lot of new players, who need playtime before we can safely field them against CRS/FRK teams.
The next Development game is at Wolves on Sunday the 18th. Ignasi has plans to make a list of players who could use the experience, and really encourage them to go.
Ignasi says will provide ID for the bank tomorrow, as Simon asked a month back (I bet he forgets and Simon has to ask him again - who’s with me?)
Jon – Club Secretary
Jon has been communicating with Adrena Sport about balls and kit. We’ve already gotten one shipment of balls, and have another coming, with the Qualiance sponsor logo on them.
Jon will also arrange getting a new BBQ for the shed.
He has finished his move to his new house, so now our old merch has found a spot in a shed, instead of his previous basement. He will share the content of the boxes with the team soon, to get them out of boxes and into hands.
Amongst the boxes are some Exiles socks. Since the women's team is short on socks, he will pick out all the small sized ones, and hand them to Sofie for them to use on game days.
Simon – Treasurer
Our accounts are in 50k+ currently - it’s gone better with getting people to pay their subs on time this year, which comes down to them having to pay their subs before we pay for their licence with RD.
We got money from Speed and FRK from the bus trip recently. Simon is still chasing CSR for this end of the bill.
Simon also spoke with Greg, and got a 25k sponsorship paid out from Bootleggers.
We currently have 340k in accounts, due to the large amount of funding we received from IA Sprog at the start of the year. But the money does no good in the accounts - we gotta start spending!
Thanks for those who did the Danske Bank thing when Simon wrote - for everyone else, please do it tonight.
Nick – Club President
Nick has nothing to say, but suggests we buy another round of beers.
No one disagrees.
Sofie – Head of Ladies
Ladies team is doing okay. We have ended fourth in our first two tournaments, which is not as good as we’d hoped, but we still have 5 more tournaments to make up for that!
We had a pretty good chance in the previous tournament, but lost it against FRK in the last seconds of the match.
We’ve finally selected our captains, which ended up being Patri as captain with Amanda as vice captain. This means that all the power stays within the committee - just as we’d planned “Muahahahah! Ahrem, sorry about that...”
Still good with the coaching situation, though it’s taking some work to get Sean fully integrated with how our team works. Right now its still a lot of work for the senior players on the team, to keep up with the management around trainings. He is obviously very passionate about coaching though, so we should do what we can to assist him with getting into our groove.
Sofie will make sure to sign the team up for Scandinavian Sevens.
Amanda – Club Captain Report
Don’t have a lot going on. It’s been interesting to find out how the whole committee work goes. Following mails has been a new kind of struggle, as a person who lives mostly in instant messaging apps!
The first Klubrepresentatskabsmøde is on Thursday, where Amanda will highlight the issue of out pitch being under construction.
She had to miss the DTU AGM, since she instead attended a rugby tournament in London, playing for a charity, Mo Rugby. So she got to play London City Sevens, which sounds very exciting indeed!
Thierry – Social Secretary
We hosted the women's 15s national team game on our pitch. We ended up doing BBQ with grills borrowed from the dorm, since ours had been stolen! Thankfully everything still went well.
All other home games this year have been played at CSR, since our pitch was deemed unsafe for games.
Sarry have started planning the AD&D. They’re trying not to do it at DTU again this year, to allow for longer stay time, and avoid the trouble of busses. They’ve been wondering about the budget for rental for previous years, to give an idea of what places could be within the scope. Jon finds a list of previous years bookings for reference.
With regards to catering, he will see if the place they find requires using their own catering, or if we will make use of Tom as in previous years.
Nick asks for the AD&D date to not be on his wife's birthday, November 28th.
Amanda suggests Nick gets a new wife.
Zorn challenges Nick on the date for his wife's birthday, and it turns out that Nick was wrong, and that his wife's birthday was actually on the 29th.
We have a substantial amount of beers in the fridge. There were 3 spare cases from the Odder trip, which is either a sign of having too many generous donors in the team, or too many weak drinkers - What do you think dear reader?
In any case, we can now charge people back for it, so extra money in the club pocket!
We’ll make sure to do a BBQ for the last training of the season.
Communication within the committee
We bring up this subject, since we’ve had a few miscommunications within the committee, in the last months time. There have been a few instances where a conversation starts in one medium and then continues in another, which causes confusion.
We speak about a generational change, in that newer members are less prone to check their emails. Amanda admits that this is a weakness of their but that being online and reachable certainly isn't. She goes on to say “I love my phone more than I love my girlfriend, Jon please don’t put that in the notes” - quote end.
At the same time we’ve also not been good enough at following up on our promises, and taking action on points.
Jon is getting the feeling that this conversation will end up requiring him to do more work, to go around and remind everyone what they’d committed to do in the meetings.
But just then - Nick leans forward and adresses the group. “I will do it!” he says, “I volunteer as tribute!”
From now on, Nick will send reminders to the committee, about unfinished tasks from last meeting. We agree that tasks should be completable, and we should work break bigger tasks into smaller tasks. Otherwise we might never find a new pitch in time for winter.
Pitch Status and Gentofte
Jacob starts by apologizing (I wrote this in the minutes during the meeting, but no longer remember why Jacob was apologizing. I will leave it in, in case someone was missing an apology from him).
He’s spoken to Frank, the Project Manager at DTU, who is the one removing the plates at the pitch when we ask for it. There are barely 2 meters on the sides, and the grass in the corner of our try zone is missing, due to the metal plates covering it over winter.
Amanda has been talking to RD about this issue, and they have said they will help us.
The question is if it is too dangerous to play on our pitch. We’d like an official from RD to come assess the pitch, so that we won’t end up having the pitch deemed unplayable by the ref on the day.
At the very least the women’s tournament will have to be moved, since there is no extra grass area to warm up in anymore.
(Update from after meeting, DTU claims that the pitch should be back to normal next year - including the football pitch)
Not having home games on our own pitch sucks, since we can’t control the aftergame fun-times, and don’t get any income through beer and hotdog sales. And there’s an added administration task in loaning other teams facilities.
We speak of other places where we can have our games for the rest of the seasons, and trainings in winter.
Gentofte pitch could maybe be used for games. Can it also be used for trainings come winter?
Lundtofte Boldklub also have some facilities which we’ve made use of some years back.
We’ll also reach out to Lyngby Taarnbæk commune and plead our case.
New strips
The committee is debating going with Macron or Adrena for our new kits.
Adrena is a 1 person Danish company that can do kits for a very favorable price.
Macron meanwhile is a huge company, which comes with a higher price, but also some benefits. Macron offers to set up a webshop for our players, where they will be able to shop Exiles merch at any time, which would be great for a team like ours that get new players all the time.
The prices for a kit with 30 strips are quite different:
Macron: 32.481,- kr
Adrena: 18.750,- kr
To get the merchandise deal with Macron they require that we purchase our kits with them also.
In the end the committee decides that the merchandise deal makes up for the added kit cost. Making a merchandise run is a lot of work, and therefore they have been far in between.
This deal would be a big load of the committees shoulders.
New BBQ, theft
There’s a feeling that people might be taking things from the shed. It’s suggested that we should change the code for the shed. However it is also an issue that the lock is not always used, since people either forget or fail in locking the door.
It is decided that we change the code to something new.
Grant money follow-up
The committee is reminded that we have been given this big grant from IA Sprog, and must use them on international player retention, within the 2 years.
Other business
No other business, thanks for reading.