The news coming out of Tennis New Zealand is hard to ignore. Not because I have a deep interest New Zealand tennis, but because the timing of serious tennis problems seems to coincide with the period when the current CEO of Swimming New Zealand (SNZ), Steve Johns, was CEO of Tennis New Zealand. That’s either stunningly bad luck or Johns is a one man business disaster zone.

I have previously written two articles on the tennis problems dating back to the Steve Johns’ era and reported in the national press. This week the Stuff website reports on another list of problems dating back to when Johns was in charge of tennis. Here is the first Stuff quote.

Wow, consider that – the Chairman of SNZ, Bruce Cotterill, hired a guy to run swimming in New Zealand who is now being associated with “infighting, cliques and egos” that left tennis in a “fractious state”. If any of that is true it sounds like swimming has drawn a very short straw. Who are we to know whether the reports of the disaster Johns left behind in tennis are accurate or not? We simply don’t know.

However, there are two things we do know. We know that the performance of SNZ in the two years since Johns arrived has been pretty bad. Membership is down, income is down, government support is down and international elite performances have been a disaster. And second we know that the source of the reports coming out of Tennis New Zealand is pretty sound. The current Tennis New Zealand CEO, Julie Paterson, is the source of most of these reports. She should know the truth. Clearly she has a dim view of the shambles she inherited.

The second report this week comes directly from Julie Patterson. Here is what she is reported to have done recently.

Once again wow, wow, wow. This time the report is explaining why international tennis travel costs have gone up to an annual cost of $758,000 in the two years since Steve Johns left Tennis New Zealand. Julie Paterson’s explanation is that she decided to pay player’s international travel costs – something tennis did not do in the Johns’ era. The report says, “She’s made the decision that we absorb all of the costs of that.”

All I can say is well done Julie Patterson. She clearly has a strong appreciation of the things that are important. She knows what needs to be funded by the national organisation. And that’s more than can be said of the CEO we inherited from tennis. Remember it was six months ago that Steve Johns continued his old tennis trick of charging the players for everything. Elite swimmers were invoiced by the Johns’ administration for $84,800 to travel to a World Championship. You clearly wouldn’t find Julie Patterson doing that. I doubt that you’d find anyone doing that except Steve Johns.

In a Steve Johns administration as long as Johns and Francis and their mates are being paid, all is well with the world. Everyone else had better have their cheque books ready. They are about to pay big time.

Mind you the leadership Steve Johns gets from the SNZ Chairman, Bruce Cotterill, is nothing special. In a recent report in the North Shore Channel magazine Cotterill is reported to have said, “One of our goals at present is to drive down the ‘user pays’ component for parents.” It’s stating the obvious to say Cotterill has been on the SNZ Board for six years and this is still “one of our goals”. What a pathetic joke. Clearly Cotterill is incapable of sorting out the disaster of charging elite athletes $84,800. Perhaps we could help him. Maybe there is a nugget of advice that could solve the user pays problem in a heartbeat. What could it be?

I know – hire Julie Patterson to run SNZ. If she can find three quarters of a million dollars to fund players international travel she sure as hell could find 10% of that to get senior swimmers to a World Championship; something the guy she replaced at Tennis New Zealand was incapable of doing.