Cornwall club cricket stalwart Rex Smith is the most likely choice as chairman of the Auckland Cricket Association.

The position was left vacant by retiring chairman Don Hattaway at last week's annual general meeting of the ACA.

Hattaway's place on the board was taken by Dr Justin Vaughan. The full board is: Smith, Vaughan, John Graham, Michelle Boag, John Crocker, Stewart Wilson and Brent King.

The new board will decide on the chairman at their first meeting.

Smith is the Cornwall club senior coach and chairman of the club. A former first-class selector for Auckland, he has had a long association with the ACA. He runs the Elite Sport Management company and is a consultant to the Auckland City Council on property matters.

At the meeting ACA chief executive Lindsay Crocker made a presentation on Auckland's intention to make a major thrust in instituting a management plan for the grass roots of the game in its region.

Auckland wanted to assist its clubs to the point where they could perform the function of providing cricket for their players without being frustrated by the need to attend to time consuming administration matters.

"In Auckland people have so little time to contribute to sports club matters. Many areas are suffering similarly but there are differences in the Auckland situation.

"Some people here spend 10 hours a week on motorways and previously eight of those 10 hours might have been available to spend on club management.

"What we are trying to do is get those sort of people to contribute to clubs without being hands-on people.

"I'm very keen on the Sportsville model the Hillary Commission was developing," Crocker said.

"A number of clubs in Auckland are sited on big council reserves and they are all in a similar position to the cricket clubs," he said.

But clubs could not be made to amalgamate. The National Rugby League in Australia was clear evidence of that.

There had to be a will, and a realisation, among participants of the need to combine.

"They have to want to do it. Invariably, when you mention these things to clubs there is a little resistance and a feeling amongst the existing management that what is planned is a criticism of what they are doing," he said.

However, he pointed to the Cornwall Cricket Club which had been running a similar system for some years and there was no coincidence in the fact that the club was the most successful in Auckland.

The Howick Pakuranga Club had just employed a manager to work on similar lines to what Cornwall was doing.

The whole process was also dependent on being able to find discretionary funding to allow the schemes to happen, all in a climate where the ability to generate funds was extremely limited.

And that situation was not helped by the reduced international cricket traffic into New Zealand this year.

"Ordinarily we would get two or three One-Day Internationals and a Test in Auckland. This year we are getting one ODI and a Test," he said.

© CricInfo