Archery and Club News

County and Clubs

Protecting Club Assets (Sunday, 19 May 2013)

The KAA has now approved the next in its series of club guides - Protecting Club Assets - and this is now available for download.

We are all familar with insuarnce cover for equipment, but clubs also have a number of less tangible assets that are frequently forgotten until problems arise, as in the recent case where a member left a sports club in acrimonious circumstances, claiming personal ownership of the club name, logo, website and much else. This new guide has been written to provide advice on some simple measures any club can take to ensure this does not happen to them.

County Records (Sunday, 19 May 2013)

All of the new county records have been added to the respective records booklets following last Monday's meeting of the KAA Operational Committee - these all have an issue date of 13 May 2013.

The committee agreed to maintain records for the Warwick family of rounds; claims will now be accepted for Warwick rounds shot on or after 14 May 2013 - please note that claims for scores shot before that date are not permitted (for details please refer to the KAA County Records policy).

All of the county records booklets have subsequently been revised and reissued, dated 14 May 2013; the changes include:

• the names of some rounds have been amended, so that they will be consistent across everything we publish;
• the order that some rounds appear in booklets has been adjusted;
• the Warwick family of rounds has been added to all of the Outdoor Target Archery booklets.

Membership Fees 2013-2014 (Sunday, 12 May 2013)

The table of membership fees for next year (i.e. commencing 01 October 2013) has now been updated to include all of this year's increases:

The increase in Regional fees is still subject to ratification, as the SCAS AGM was inquorate.

A full list of membership fees and pro-ration for new members is now available from the Clubs section.

Nationwide Tournament Diary (Sunday, 14 April 2013)

Brighton Bowmen have recently created a tournament diary that is intended to fill the gap left by the recent demise of the "Mayflower Diary". Their aim is to include any and all archery tournaments from around the country and it is not restricted to those conducted within the ArcheryGB fold.

They have started by bringing together tournaments from a wide range of sources into one large table that can be sorted in a variety of ways. Any club that wishes to advertise their tournament should contact them direct.

This diary can also be accessed from our Links page, under the 'Archery Info.' tab.

Welcome (Sunday, 31 March 2013)

The KAA Operational Committee would like to welcome Glyn Levis of Canterbury Archers, who has agreed to fill the final remaining vacancy on the committee.

He joins as the second "Ordinary Member"; while this post has no defined portfolio, it is an opportunity to learn more about how the county governing body operates, increases the breadth of opinion and experience available to the committee and exists to help out on occasional tasks that need additional input.

Criminal Record (CRB) Checks (Sunday, 31 March 2013)

With effect from 01 December 2012, the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) and the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) were merged to form the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), an agency of the UK government's Home Office. As a result of this change all future CRB checks will be known as DBS checks - the name has changed, but the stationery (apart from the name on the form) and process remain the same.

There are some further changes that have been mentioned recently in the media and are expected in the future:

• portability of DBS checks, that should help reduce the number of checks that an individual volunteer will be subjected to, if they work for more than one organisation;
• exclusion of certain old and minor offences (convictions and cautions), provided that they did not incur a custodial sentence - this is currently before parliament for consideration and requires legislation before it can come into effect.

It is important to note that these last two changes have not yet come into effect.
Read more:

Archery Big Weekend (Sunday, 31 March 2013)

The Archery Big Weekend is back on 24, 25 and 26 August 2013!

Archery clubs and organisations across the nation are invited to open their doors and welcome members of the public to come and try out archery. It is the perfect opportunity to celebrate your club, enhance your local profile, fund raise and attract new members.

To take part, all that clubs have to do is complete the application form. The first 30 clubs to sign up will be entered into a free prize draw and could win equipment vouchers worth £100.
Read more:

KAA Tournaments

Important Note: Tournaments and events advertised on this web site are normally only available to current members of GNAS/ArcheryGB or another national archery association affiliated to World Archery. Some longbow tournaments might also be open to BLBS members. Tournament Organisers are entitled to place additional restrictions on entries, so it is important to check any terms and conditions on the individual tournament entry form.

Longbow Championship Target List (Sunday, 12 May 2013)

The target list for the 2013 KAA Longbow Championship at the Vigo RFC ground on Sunday, 19 May 2013 is now available for download.

County Invitation Results (Sunday, 12 May 2013)

This year's County Invitation Tournament was held at the Vigo RFC ground on Sunday, 05 May 2013 in sunshine! Congratulations to everyone who qualified to take part.

The results are now available to download.

KAA Indoor County Match (Sunday, 31 March 2013)

The indoor county match that was originally intended for the end of March has now been rescheduled for 30 November 2013 and Kent will be competing against teams from Essex, Middlesex and Surrey. The match is now shown in the 2013 diary.

The match will include Compound for the first time as well as the customary Recurve (Freestyle) in separate teams, so please keep in mind the recent changes to the Score Returns and County Team Selection policy that now includes threshold scores for submitting indoor compound results.

More information will be available nearer the date.

KAA Target Championship (Monday, 18 February 2013)

The 2013 KAA Target Archery Championship will again be held at the Vigo RFC ground on Sunday, 18 August 2013.

Full details and entry form are now available for download.

KAA Tournament for Disabled (Monday, 18 February 2013)

The 2013 KAA Tournament for Disabled will take place at Sittingbourne Community College on Saturday, 20 July 2013.

Full details and entry form are now available for download.

KAA Clout Championship (Sunday, 06 January 2013)

The first set of details and entry form for a KAA tournament is now available and more will follow in the next few weeks.

The 2013 KAA Clout Championship will again be hosted by Thanet Archery Club, incorporated into their Tassel Status tournament in Ramsgate on Sunday, 15 September 2013.

Full details and entry form are now available for download.

Regional and National

ArcheryGB Annual General Meeting (Sunday, 21 April 2013)

In response to membership requests for ArcheryGB to hold its AGM in different parts of the country, last year it was held in Stratford (East London) and this year it was held yesterday in Warrington, Cheshire (Northern Counties region).

The main points of local interest:

• Annual membership fees for the 2013-2014 membership year will rise (£1.00 increase for senior and junior club members) in line with the request to raise fees regularly by small amounts, rather then rely on occasional larger increases. The full fee structure for 2013-2014 is now available.
• Derrick Lovell (Bowmen of Woodstock) has been elected as President of ArcheryGB.
• Mike Brighton (Tonbridge Archery Club) has been elected to a third term as Vice-President.

The main discussions centered around:

• how ArcheryGB can provide financial information that members will find informative, in contrast to the statutory accounts provided in the AGM booklet.
• the best way of presenting the statutory business of the AGM and the other business/discussions that members expect of such a meeting and how the 'non-statutory' business should be recorded to ensure future action and for posterity.
• the reasons for reviewing ArcheryGB governance and what form this might take.

The afternoon session included presentations and question and answer sessions, including:

• Ian McGibbon (Director NI) on the governance review;
• Sara Symington (Performance Director) on performance funding and the 'way to Rio 2016' and beyond.

Details of all the presentations will be available shortly from the ArcheryGB website.

Next year the AGM will be held at the University of Derby (East Midlands region) on Saturday, 26 April 2014.

International

Archery Upgraded to 'Core' Olympic Sport (Sunday, 17 February 2013)

Archery will form part of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and is now also set to be included in the 'core' sports in 2020 (the host city for which is due to be decided this year).

Last Tuesday (12 February 2013) the IOC Executive Committee announced the list of 25 sports that it will be recommending for inclusion as 'core' sports for the Games in 2020. The list will be on the agenda of the 125th IOC Session in September, where the final list is due to be approved.

At a more local level, the inclusion of any sport in the Olympic core list makes it much easier to find sponsor ship and development funding right down to club level.

Read more: (new article 13 February 2013)

Development

Protecting Playing Fields Fund (Sunday, 23 December 2012)

Most archery clubs are dependent on school/college playing fields or similar and it is not uncommon to hear of clubs loosing their ground because of building development; if this sounds familiar, read on...

Communities across the country can bid for a share of £2 million of National Lottery investment to protect and improve their local sports playing fields. The latest round of Sport England's Protecting Playing Fields fund will help enhance local playing fields or create new sports pitches.

The Protecting Playing Fields fund is part of the £150 million Places People Play legacy programme that is bringing the magic of a home Olympic and Paralympic Games into communities across the country. Every sports facility that receives funding will carry the London 2012 Inspire mark - celebrating the link to this summer's Games.

Through the Protecting Playing Fields fund, Sport England is making investments of between £20,000 and £50,000 to create, improve and protect playing fields by:

• bringing disused playing fields back into use
• improving the condition of pitches (e.g. leveling, drainage, reseeding)
• buying new playing field land (not less than 0.2 hectares)
• buying existing playing field land where there is a known threat, such as the expiry of a lease or a development proposal.

Read more:

EduCare for Sport (Sunday, 04 November 2012)

Archery GB encourage all forward-looking clubs to sign up for EduCare for Sport, a bespoke online learning service that features a range of essential duty of care and introductory business skills programmes for your volunteers and members. Each programme is presented in bite-size learning chunks and there is a downloadable personalised certificate for successful completers. Clear, simple management reports help you to see who has started, is in progress or has completed their programmes.

There are 10 learning programmes including 'NSPCC Child Protection Awareness in Sport and Active Leisure', 'An Introduction to Equality and Diversity', 'NSPCC Preventing Bullying Behaviour', 'An Introduction to Safety in Clubs' and introductions to finance, budgeting, marketing and planning.

Further information is available on the EduCare website and discounts are available to ontarget clubs by contacting Arran Coggan at the ArcheryGB office.

Club Leaders (Sunday, 20 May 2012)

As with most sports, the volunteers who do the day-to-day running of our clubs are vital to archery. Many people who take on these roles for the first time have little prior experience, so it is unsurprising that from time to time we get requests for help in understanding how to do the job and how to do it well.

In the past there was little or no help available on how to be a club secretary, treasurer or any of the other jobs that make up a club management committee. More recently ArcheryGB and Running Sports have provided some help and now there is another resource available.

Many of the skills required to administer a successful club are very similar to those needed to run a successful business, so Sport England and PriceWaterhouse Coopers have teamed up to provide free e-learning training and support, under the name "Club Leaders".

Club Leaders is part of the Olympic Legacy programme, Places People Play, and provides free training and support to those doing the day-to-day running of community sport, helping create a robust, economically sustainable and enterprising club network.

Registering with Club Leaders gives you access to all of the learning, support and networking opportunities:
Read more:

Coaching

For news about coaching and coach development, please visit the Invicta Coaching Group website.

Website

Internet Explorer - Older Versions (Thursday, 09 May 2013)

Because of the expense and difficulty involved in installing multiple versions of Internet Explorer, testing is currently only practical by using the simulation tools built into Microsoft's 'Expression Web 4, Super Preview' and the Developer Tools available in Internet Explorer 10. Although these normally give accurate results, under some circumstances they can prove to be not totally reliable.

Future development will concentrate on providing additional content and to improve compatibility with mobile devices; because of the considerable limitations of some older browsers, it will not always be possible to take them into account.

As a result, in common with most web developers, we will do what is practical to support version 7, but we cannot guarantee that all pages will function correctly. Anyone still using Windows XP is strongly advised to upgrade their browser to Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Vista users should consider upgrading their browser to Internet Explorer 9 (the most recent compatible in each case), both of which we plan to support for the foreseeable future.

For a full list of supported browsers, please see our technical information page.

There is a known issue with the display of some content contained in tabbed sections of pages, when using IE7 - it is normally possible to coax it into displaying the content, by clicking on the tab button, then moving the cursor away from the tab. The reason lies in a well-documented problem with this browser, but it has not been possible to find a work-around that is compatible with later browsers that work correctly.

Para-Archery Categories (Sunday, 07 April 2013)

The descriptions of the Para-Archery categories provided in the Glossary page have been updated to follow more closely the current descriptions in the IPC and World Archery documentation.

It is important to note that these are simplified descriptions only - comprehensive functional definitions can be found under the 'Classification' menu option in the 'Para-Archery' section of the World Archery website.

Site Search Repaired (Sunday, 24 February 2013)

The "site search" at the top-right of each page has now been repaired and can be used to search either this website only (the default) or the internet, using the Google search engine. It would appear that it has been broken for some time, but only recently spotted as part of detailed testing.

Touch Icons & Tiles (Monday, 18 February 2013)

If you wish to save a shortcut to this website on your iPad/iPhone or Android device, the new 'touch icon' (in place of a generic button) will now make it easy to identify. For those of you that are already using Windows 8, you can also save a shortcut as a tile on your home screen.

Website Development (Sunday, 10 February 2013)

This month brings a few new developments to the website, including some minor styling changes and a number of technical improvements to make future changes that bit easier.

The first change is that new County Records can now be added much more easily, an issue that has become increasingly significant in the last couple of years, with more available categories and more records being approved.

You might recall that when ArcheryGB changed its age groups for girls back in 2010, all existing records were reassigned to the new age groups; the website, however, continued to show the records in the age group for which they were originally awarded. This has now been brought up to date and the website is now consistent with the records books.

The second change is to the club list and map that have been updated to allow clubs to include social media pages that they own. The following options are currently available, but others can be included if required: (hover your cursor over each icon to check who it is).

Just give details of the page to the webmaster and we will arrange for it to be included in your club's information, but please note that we can only accept links that belong to the club, not to its members' personal pages.