AGM

Supporting Yvonne's reminder of the date of the Annual General Meeting of the club and the appeal for members to come along, I would urge all members who can to go along to the Town Hall that night. Members of all ages have the right to attend - and I would go even further and say that they have a DUTY to attend. It is your only chance to call the Committee to account, to congratulate them on their conduct of the club's affairs over the past year or to make sugestions as to what the new Committee might do next year. The two main officers in the club are the secretary and treasurer - presidents come and serve three or four years and move on to another office on the Committee but the best Secretaries and Treasurers go on for years. We are fortunate in having Yvonne and Jim in these positions and the club really needs them to stay on if they possibly can. Peter has done a good job as President as have the remainder of the Committee. There are two issues that I think need to be addressed.
The first is about the future training premises of the club. To determine that we need to know when the track at St Peter's is to become available. This is something that the Committee will have to start chasing up. Information seems hard to find. The Committee should write regularly or even frequently to get the information and any update available: don't expect the Local Authority to keep a letter we sent in 2009 in mind and reply as soon as they know what is happening. Anyone with connections on the Council should be asking them about the topic and anyone with contacts in the Regional Offices should be using that contact for the benefit of the club. Once we know that then it will be fairly clear what we will have to do. The second is what do we do for summer training premises in summer 2010. It is bad enough that the Seniors and Juniors never - or seldom - meet, it is worse when the Juniors do not have a single training venue that they can advertise to potential recruits. I would dare to suggest (it's OK for me, I don't have to do the work these days but I can see what works) that they train say twice a week at Scotstoun for a start. It is busier than Linwood but much, much easier to get to. Almost all school pupils in Clydebank and District know where it is. It is not expensive and it offers all the facilities we need. We used to use Crown Point into the late 90's and it is further away - all the athletes and their parents were happy to go there. And it was shared with Shettleston, Cambuslang, Glasgow Ladies AC, Victoria Park and many others. Scotstoun could be a go-er. The only exception would be field events which are difficult to access. I would suggest either Kelvin Hall or do a deal with West Dunbarton to use Postie's. That would give us Scotstoun on Tuesday and Thursday and the field events venue on either Wednesday or Saturday morning. You can criticise the above if you like but if you do, you need to come up with something better. The matter can't be left in limbo. So the two things I would ask the Committee would be (1) work as hard as possible on access to the new track; (2) Sort out this summer's training for the Juniors and for track athletes generally.