The club is desperate for volunteers to ensure the club continues to maintain its current position and to progress. Many of the club’s current volunteers have been working for the club for many years, many of them have several roles and it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to carry out all the required duties. Volunteers are required in a variety of roles, but the main ones are outlined below.
OFFICIALS
The club is desperately short of officials. There are several problems created by this shortage:
- Where we don’t provide the required officials the club loses points. This has happened several times this season in more than one league. This effectively means that where athletes score points they are taken away.
- Trying to run home meetings is difficult, particularly because a wider range of official are required for these meetings. To help this situation, sometimes the club just needs helpers as well as officials. Lin and Sarah, who carry out many other roles, often have to do the assistant starters role. Any help with this would be great.
- The range of events that the club can provide at Open Meetings is limited because we need to provide all the officials for these meetings. Normally we can only provide one field team and this means we can only put on one event at the same time.
- The shortage of officials is also becoming a problem at county level and it is possible events could be cancelled
This year ( Sunday 3rd November) the club has arranged for the county officials courses to be run at Medway Park. These courses only run twice a year and always outside of the track and field season. The club is looking for Field Judges, Track Judges, Timekeepers and Assistant Starters. Although these titles may seem scary to some, at Level 1 they require limited knowledge and responsibility. Because the Health & Safety element is now on-line (just 90 minutes), these courses are just 3 hours (5 hours for the Field Judge). The minimum age for these courses is 14. For further information please contact Steve Hesketh at hesketh.steve@googlemail.com
COACHING ASSISTANT
The club requires additional coaching assistants to help existing coaching assistants and coaches. The club currently has a waiting list for athletes at Medway Park and for some age groups now the waiting list has had to be closed. It is very frustrating that we have youngsters that want to get involved in athletics but we just haven’t got the volunteers to supervise/train them. Increasing the number of coaching assistants would allow the current coaches to look after more athletes and/or allow them to specialise more. As with Official’s courses, local coaching assistant courses are infrequent. There is one at the Julie Rose Stadium, Ashford (9th and 10th November). Sometimes, if there aren’t enough participants, these courses are cancelled. This means we may have 1 or 2 wanting to do the course but they can’t progress, so if you feel you could help please contact Sarah or Steve H. Minimum age is 16. For further information please contact Steve Hesketh at hesketh.steve@googlemail.com