West Dunbartonshire Newsletter

The November edition of the West Dunbartonshire Sports Club Newsletter has just appeared and as far as I am aware copies only go to the club secretary and other selected recipients. I was selected because I was on the Local Athletics Partnership Committee. It's fairly interesting and there is actually some useful information in it as well as at least one mistake. The front sheet of seven brightly coloured sides of A4 has information about a new booklet on Coach Education Courses which will be ready for March 2010. This is something that we should keep an eye on and something that we should be promoting to parents and senior club members - like all clubs we will need coaches and the situation at national level is dire! Courses are available only for Level 1 coaches and people are crying out for the next three levels to be tackled - as one chap said on a forum the Level 1 is nowadays as useful as a chocolate watch for new coacches. Throughout the newsletter there is information on funding opportunities for clubs and on the front page clubs are encouraged to contact Laura Young if they have any specific funding needs.This is carried on on page two with Sportsmatch, the 2014 Communities Grant, Cashback for Communities and the Strathclyde Police Communities Partnership Fund all being prominently displayed. The big item on Page 3 is that there will be new procedures for Disclosure Checking Volunteers - Donald should know about this one already if what is said is right. There is a plug for the WD Quality Club scheme which is a lower level version of the Scottish Aathletics Clubmark scheme. (Incidentally, where are we on the submission for this one?)
Without going through the whole document it has information on individual clubs, on how to promote your club and so on. The one mistake is in the bit about Clydesdale Harriers. I was asked in May for some information about something we were doing and since we had started the long and high jumping in Postie's Park at that time I told them about it. It is now there - 6 months late and so it is just wrong! We don't go to Postie's on Mondays any more! Finally I would like to highlight the item about the West Dunbartonshire Sports Council. This is a body that has proved very useful to us in the past and could be so again. We were founder members of the predecessor body - the Clydebank Sports Council - and Phil was on the WD version for some time. Membership has many uses as well as being available for grants at club level, it also gives out individual grants and I reckon that if we had let the membership lapse, we should resurrect it and rejoin.