Sport New Zealand would like to say a huge thanks to the half a million New Zealand who do thousands of tough jobs in sport and recreation every week - just for the love of it.
There are 41,000 people paid to work in sport in New Zealand, but 500,000 people working unpaid.
Volunteers are incredibly important at every level. Without grassroots helpers, sport simply wouldn’t happen – and players could never advance to world-class level.
What do volunteers do?
Volunteers are:
- coaches
- umpires
- referees
- judges
- scorers
- starters
- and other officials.
Volunteers also include the people who:
- wash the uniforms
- transport the team
- cut the oranges
- fill the water bottles
- clean the clubrooms
- and give their time in other ways.
Where you can find out more
Read Volunteers: The Heart of Sport – The Experiences and Motivations of Sports Volunteers 2007 or request a printed copy by contacting us web@sportnz.org.nz.
The Heart of Sport – The Experiences and Motivations of Sports Volunteers 2007 (PDF, 318 Kb)
Read about what the research tells us on Finding and Keeping Volunteers (PDF, 306 Kb)
Are you a volunteer?
Here are some resources which may help you as a volunteer:
A booklet on how to get started in coaching (PDF, 873 Kb)
A booklet on coaching development and education (PDF, 272 Kb)
Some information on CoachCorp – Sport NZ’s corporate coaching programme
Relevant research on how to find and keep volunteers (PDF, 306 Kb)
Officials tips (PDF, 392 Kb)
Volunteers the Heart of Sport (PDF, 2.5 Mb)
Appendix A - Volunteers Survey - Questionnaire (PDF, 139 Kb)
Appendix B - Volunteers Survey - Tables (PDF, 1.06 Mb)
Check out the following links:
Department of Sport and Recreation in Western Australia
This is the website of the Department of Sport and Recreation in Western Australia. Its officials section has some easy to read info-sheets for sports officials and their clubs on recruiting and retaining officials, and dealing with harassment of sports officials.
ACC
Sports officials get injured too! Check out ACC’s Injury Prevention section for information on the most common sporting injuries and great advice on how to avoid getting injured in the first place.
Volunteering New Zealand
This website contains a huge array of information covering all things volunteering. There are some interesting articles on which government policies are impacting on volunteers in New Zealand, plus further useful links.
