by Southside Archery’s AGM was held on Friday the 24th of April to lay out the club’s plans for next year. There were so many updates and exciting things planned that the deserve their own blog post.
One exciting piece of news is that we have been able to secure an extra evening at Easterhouse Sport Centre while another club is off over the summer so from May till August we will also have Thursday evening sessions. We plan to use these extra sessions for a few things like improver courses which have been requested by members recently and competitions. Exact plans and timetables are still being worked on but we will get the details out as soon as we have them.
The club also recently received a private donation from my family member of one of the committee and this came with some suggestions of how the money should be used. One of the suggestions was for some sort of fun event or night out so we decided to take this idea and turn it into a prize giving night. There are a lot of details to be worked out but the hope is that this will become a yearly event. There will be multiple prizes so everyone has a chance to win and we will also tie it in with the competitions that will be running at the Thursday sessions.
Probably the most exciting update for me is around volunteer training. As a non-affiliated club we provide our own insurance through a specialist sports insurer. One of the terms of this insurance is that the person in charge of the shoot must have an Archery GB recognised qualification but as a small, non-affiliated club we find these hard to access. The Archery Instructor Award is also very expensive at over £200 per candidate and they are often held far away from where we are based and sometimes involve staying over which excludes a lot of people from being able to attend.
I recently put together a project plan to grow the club and we used this to apply for funding for new equipment to let us bring more beginners into the club, but a huge part of the project is to create and deliver internal training for our volunteers. We were awarded the full amount of grant funding from Glasgow Life, just over £1700 and I set about trying to find an insurance company that would remove the requirement for a specific qualification.
Thankfully with the help of a specialist broker I have been able to get a policy that will allow our own internal training after sending them the courses I have written for review. This removes a huge expense for the club as we no longer need to pay over £200 per instructor for training and also gives us complete flexibility and control over when courses run. It also allows us to control the content of the courses and that lets us create courses that teach things the Instructor Award does not such as learning styles, coaching skills and first aid, none of which are covered in the Archery GB Award. Providing our own training also means we can provide training to our young people, many of whom are keen to volunteer.
The new training has two levels, an Assistant Instructor Award and a Lead Instructor Award with the Assistant Instructor course starting first.
The Assistant Instructor Award is open to those over 14 and allows adults and our young people to gain skills around keeping people safe at archery, teaching skills, equipment safety and first aid. On completion of the award, our Assistant Instructors will be able to assist Lead Instructors at beginners courses and regular shoots. There will always be a Lead Instructor present and in overall charge of the range, but our assistants will provide vital support to the lead and the archers at the shoot.
Both courses are delivered by a competency framework with most of the learning occurring at our regular shoots alongside a candidate workbook but there are a few taught sessions which will be delivered via Teams and a practical first aid session that will be delivered in person. The courses are designed to be as flexible as possible, learners can demonstrate a competency and have this signed off at any of our shoots and we will try and offer as many options as we can for taught sessions.
At the moment I am awaiting a confirmation of when the new equipment we have ordered will arrive, however a rough timeline is that we expect to be running our next beginners course around the middle of May and will run our first intake of the Assistant Instructor Award alongside this. We then plan to offer “top up” training to our existing Archery GB qualified instructors to bring them up to the level of our Lead Instructor award before starting to deliver this award to new Lead Instructors.
It is going to be a very exciting time at Southside Archery! I’m incredibly proud of how far we have come in such a short time. The club has only been running since 2019 and in that time we have had a global pandemic, had a venue close down, been thrown out of another venue due to our members coming from all over Glasgow and finally settled into a sports centre giving us the space to really grow the club. Providing our own in-house training not only lets us grow the club, but lets us support our volunteers to gain knowledge and skills that will help them grow their confidence.
It’s going to be a very exciting year to be a part of Southside Archery and I for one am hugely proud of how far the club has come and how much we are growing.
– Kirsty
