30 Jul 2024Northern Districts (ND) is delighted by NZC’s Match Officials announcement today, with the region’s talent featuring across the 2024-25 National Panels. Greg Pennell, ND’s Regional Official of the Year in both 2022-23 and 2023-24, has been appointed to the National Umpire Panel for the first time.
Greg’s richly deserved appointment to the NZC National Panel is a huge achievement and reflects his skills and commitment to umpiring at the highest domestic levels. Along with being awarded ND’s Regional Official of the Year award in both 2022-23 and 2023-24, he also won the 2022-23 NZC Community Cricket Official of the Year Award.
“Greg joined ND nine seasons ago as a club umpire and got himself on the ND Regional Panel within a couple of seasons” says ND’s Regional Umpire Manager Luan Kloppers. “Greg served on our Regional Panel until he got the NZC National contract. We are very proud he is a product of our pathway programme.”
“He is an outstanding match official and is known for his high standard of on-field decision making and he has the ability to build trusting relationships on and off the field. He developed very good high-performance habits of plan, prepare, perform, review and modify.”
“Greg is a humble person who would do a three-day mid-week first class game just to return to ND to do a Saturday reserve grade club game. Our 24/25 moto for ND umpires is “Serving the game and caretaking the position”, and Greg symbolises this.”
“His professional approach is based on his values of discipline, focus, motivation, purpose and performance. We are all very proud of Greg!”
Former ND men’s captain Brad Wilson also features - he is in his second year of the NZCPA Scholarship Umpire Programme based in Auckland. This programme is an “exciting collaboration between the New Zealand Cricket Player’s Association and NZC, with the aim to encourage more former players to take up umpiring” said NZC in their announcement this morning.
Wilson, who played for ND from 2004/05-2014/15 and captained the side to Plunket Shield victory in 2011/11, is one of two inaugural recipients of the scholarship which started last season.
"The first season was really enjoyable," says Wilson. "It's a big learning curve and change. As a player, you know the rules pretty well, but as an umpire there is so much more to understand. It's a hugely busy role - time goes more quickly out in the middle as an umpire than it does as a player!"
"The long term goal is to make umpiring my career and get on the ICC Panel, but I've got a lot of work to do between now and then."
NZC’s panel announcements also featured ND’s Christelle High, who has been appointed to the NZC National Emerging Women’s Umpire Panel for the third year running. Chris High, Chris James, Dean Plummer, and Justin Williams are named in the National Scorer Panel; and Shirish Nagar is on the National Reserve Scorer Panel.
Congratulations to all panelists.
Read the NZC announcement here: https://play.nzc.nz/news
