View from the Chair – October 2022
Dear member,
If all goes to plan, this will be my last monthly update as Chair. Peter Thompson has put himself forward to be the next Chair, as recommended by the committee and awaits election at the Prize giving and AGM on 17th October. Please put this date in the diary and come along to celebrate our prize winners and ensure we can elect the club’s officers for the year ahead.
When I agreed to put myself forward to be Chair in 2016, I certainly had no inkling of the rollercoaster ahead with a major pandemic knocking society and the club severely for 6-12 months. However, I understood what a huge amount of time and energy two people, in particular, were putting into the club. Neil Costello had spent 18 years as Chair, building the club to over 800 members in the wake of the 2012 Olympics as well as coaching and running himself. Noel Moss covered a huge amount for the club, including writing the newsletter, organising Track and Field competitions, training new officials and coaching numerous sessions a week. The club would be non-existent without the volume of work they put in.
It was clear that no individuals would be able to replace all of what they had been doing and so we set about broadening the number of volunteers and credit has to go to Neil and Noel for embracing and driving this themselves too. I’m pleased to say this has been very successful with both still active members of the club albeit with reduced workloads.
We also quickly took action to improve the way we communicate with you, our members, and commissioned a new WordPress-based website to make it easy to create news stories which replicate to Facebook and generate automated newsletters. We also moved over to using Google’s tools to allow the use of <role>@cambridgeandcoleridge.org.uk emails and have cloud-based storage areas, among many other valuable features – all free as a charity. More recently we have also moved to a completely new membership system which not only reduces our costs, but eases administration too.
The Covid-delayed club plan of 2021 sets out our further plans to improve club governance, ease management and sets out our ambitions for wider engagement of members and the community.
All in all, I’m proud of the work done by so many different people to help move the club forward, enabling an amazing range of athletic training and competition opportunities for under-13s through to over-80s – all for less than £80 per year.
I’m pleased to be passing the baton on to someone so passionate about our sport and I look forward to continuing as an active member myself for many years ahead.
All the best,
Keith Clarke
Chair, Cambridge and Coleridge Athletic Club