New FIT Board to prioritise member engagement

The recent Federation of International Touch (FIT) election saw Mike (Abro) Abromowitz become one of the new members of the FIT board and already the new Swiss-based director has hit the ground running. 

“It’s a really exciting time in Touch for us now. There’s a huge amount to be done. I really want to increase the engagement between FIT and its members. I want to get a better understanding of what our members want from FIT, to find out what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong. We are here for our members.” Mike went on to say,” A board never makes the right decisions all the time but through consensus, engagement and consultation hopefully we can get to a point where members can see we are doing the right things for them.” 

Years of involvement

It’s also fair to say that Mike’s broad international experience as a player, coach and administrator has him perfectly positioned to sit on the FIT board. His earliest involvement with the sport was as a seven-year-old growing up in South Africa playing a form of the game called ‘one Touch’ which according to Mike “involved a lot of skill, a lot of side-stepping and pace.” He went on to represent South Africa as a player for many years. He moved to England in the year 2000 where he played in and coached club teams before moving up to national level. 

Bridging the gap in Europe 

It was as an England coach that Mike noticed there was a huge gap in skill between the England teams and their European neighbours. He decided that it was not healthy for the sport to have one country so far ahead of the rest and embarked on a mission to try to help other countries raise their level of play. He took his coaching expertise to France, Guernsey, Jersey and Scotland in a bid to improve the standard of Touch in Europe. 

Mike will bring this motivation for helping developing Touch countries to the FIT board. He sees the lack of regular competition as a challenge for smaller nations and would like to see more international competitions between World Cups. “Some countries only experience top level Touch once every four years and it’s really difficult to develop as a country to a high level when you’re only playing against the top countries every four years.” 

Olympic sized vision for the future

As a new FIT board member would love to see the sport of Touch become “The sport of choice in as many countries as possible around the world with the ultimate aim for our sport to achieve Olympic sport recognition.” He cites the “proliferation of mixed sports” at the Tokyo Olympics as a positive sign for Touch in this regard. There would be many challenges for FIT and its members to overcome to make such a dream a reality however as Mike says, “A challenge is just an opportunity.”