The IFF CB meeting was as usually divided to two different sections. On Saturday the IFF CB had its working sessions where the CB prepares and plans activities for the future and also discusses about the topics, which will need a decision during the actual meeting.
This time the CB was broadly discussing and preparing the future of Floorball from the competition perspective. Many topics were brought up by the IFF member associations during the Associations Meeting in Bratislava in December 2017.
The IFF CB also discussed about the changes and updates to the IFF statutes, which will be presented to the IFF General Assembly in December 2018 in Prague. Most of the discussed changes and updates are mainly related to have the IFF statutes to be up to date in the ever changing world of sports.
WFC 2018, Prague, Czech Republic
The awareness of the WFC 2018 in Czech Republic has increased a lot and most of the people in Czech Republic in general are aware that the WFC 2018 will be played in Prague. The WFC 2018 LOC has also plans to run several promotional events all around Czech Republic in order to increase the hype around the WFC 2018 even more. The ticket sales for the WFC 2018 has also started very well.
As from WFC 2016 on, the IFF has carried out a GSI study and interviews and the plan is also to have the same study also in conjunction of the WFC 2018.
U19 WFC 2019, Halifax, Canada
The European qualifications for the upcoming Men’s U19 will be played in Italy and in Russia during the first and second weekend in September and the AOFC qualifications will be played in New Zealand in the end of September 2018.
Rules and Competition Committee
Based on the proposal by the RACC the CB decided that the International Friendly matches regulations shall be updated with age restrictions for U16 and U23 and that the all Competition regulations shall be updated in accordance with the updated match fixing regulations in the Juridical Regulations. The IFF is not planning to organize WFCs for these age groups separately.
The IFF CB also decided to do minor update to the new edition of the Rules of the Game. To the section 605/7 in the rules of the game to change the wording to be : “When a team captain requests measuring of a hook, control of the shaft/blade combination or the face mask grill and the controlled equipment is correct.”
Referee Committee
The IFF Way of Refereeing Playbook was published on the 21st of March in all IFF social media channels, published on the IFF website and was also sent to all IFF member associations. Based on the feedback from the member associations there was a small update made to the educational rule interpretations. The update was mad in co-operation with the IFF RACC and regards how to carry out the penalty shot. In the update it was defined that if the ball in the penalty shot crosses the imaginary extension of the goal line, the penalty shot is considered to be over.
Athletes Commission
The IFF Athletes Commission had its meeting in conjunction with the WU19 WFC 2018 in St.Gallen in Switzerland during the weekend of the tournament. During Sunday morning, the ATC ran a training session that was open to teams who were no longer participating in the U19 WFC and also to some players from a local girl´s club. New Zealand and Australia trained with the ATC, along with 8 players from UHC Wasa. The sessions were a great success and the ATC members felt that this kind of interaction was exactly the kind of activity that they should do more of in the future.
Ms. Agatha Plechan, an IFF ATC member, will participate in the WADA Athlete Commission symposium for Athletes, representing the IFF.
Media
On the IFF social media channels (U19 WFC + IFF Floorball) the event had 856k impressions on Twitter and 697k impressions on Facebook. Instagram engagement was 97k, Twitter engagement 24k and Facebook engagement 10k.
The social media channels performed better than in the previous Men’s U19 in any other section except Facebook Impressions. This might simply be due to the algorithm change on Facebook as nowadays Facebook doesn’t show as much content of the “liked pages” as it used to.
U19 social media channels were mostly handled by an outside Media Crew during the event and IFF was more than happy with their work and thus has also recommended them to the WFC 2018 LOC and CC2019 in case they need help.
The IFF made a deal with QTV to have U19 WFC match videoclips on social media from the last two days, to see how these effects the Social Media. The test included 7 matches (matches in Athletik zentrum 5-6.5) and all in all there were 58 individual videoclips and 7 compilation clips. QTV also created an end bumper according to the IFF wishes.
The clips gained a lot of attention on social media and the idea was also to create more visibility to the events by not completely prohibiting filming.
Material Board
The IFF Material Board held its yearly meeting on the 15th of May 2018. The Material Board discussed and approved the update of the Material Regulation, the reporting of the 2017 Material Board development projects, agreed the time table for the Material Regulation 2020 review process and grant financial support to the Philippine Floorball Association and to the IFF Birmingham World Games 2021 project.
The minutes of the IFF Central Board meeting will be published later during the upcoming week
