Notes from England Squash national meeting

Seamus Singh (Chairman) and I, Richard Bickers (League Secretary), went to Birmingham on Saturday to attend the England Squash (ES) council meeting in the morning and the CAN meeting in the afternoon. It might not sound like everyone's perfect Saturday, but these meetings allow us to get to meet, greet, know, talk to and influence ES, the board of directors and the rest of the network of county associations. This is how we as a county influence what goes on at the national level and, since the players in the county know us well, and we know ES and their board well, the gap between whacking a ball about on your local court and the chief exec of ES is actually very small.

We are one county of many but, as is the way of these things, you only have to say something significant at the right time and to the right people to make a difference. This is possible because Avon, as a county, is supporting ES through membership.

Saturday was split into two main parts:

• The ES council meeting and AGM. ES uses these events to get feedback on significant proposals directly from the counties. In the past they have been somewhat one-way presentations and we've been a bit frustrated at that but this time - based on feedback - they focused on 4 main topics, the first two of which we actually spent a bit of time on. All the documents can be found here.

Participation. Doc here.

Sport England is making funds available to ES in order to increase participation. The target audience are the 'casual dippers' who play very occasionally over the course of a year and they want them to be playing more. There are, apparently 1.3 million of these dippers, according to Sport England statistics! We're somewhat sceptical of the numbers but it's a lot and many, many times the number of us playing league. We're *not* the target market. We'd play squash in a shed if we had to...

Counties can access those funds if they are prepared to map what they're doing to one of the four funded programs; Squash 101, Squash Girls Can, Junior 101 and Squash 57 (racketball to you and me...) and use the ES app to capture participation data. The targets are really quite low; 11,000 total participants in these programs over the next three years across the country. Out of a 1.3 million target audience... The county needs to record data to help meet these targets if it wants to access regional funding to help implement its development plan.  Seamus will work with the coaches and other leaders to identify appropriate sessions that could be used for this purpose. The other constraint (from Sport England) is that we must work with at least one other county (i.e. a regional forum) so we will be looking to create partnerships with neighbouring counties. More on this as it develops.  One of the key messages about the programmes such as Squash 101 and Squash Girls Can is that they are not designed to be coaching courses.  They are designed to get as many people as possible involved in a session in order to get as many new people playing the game in a fun, interactive and social way.  Some of these people may end up being league players but that is not its primary intention.

Organisational structure (or 'the squash system' as ES call it). Doc here.

This doesn't sound very exciting but it's actually important as it defines how all the various groups involved in squash all talk to each other.  It shows how the board of directors 'direct' ES strategically and it's how the counties have their say. Not to mention the coaches, refs, leisure centres, universities, etc. etc.  There was a lot of discussion on this as this has been a weak area for too long - many of the counties *don't* feel they have had much of a voice and yet they are the people that actually get things done at the grass roots of the sport and represent those players back to the executive.

The upshot of the discussion is that the counties felt that the CAN (see below) is the best way of working collectively with ES and ES need to make some changes to their proposal! It will be a good test of their listening skills when we see their response to our feedback.  Avon is a significant member of CAN.  We have good communication with all the other counties and most of the ES staff, whom we know well, but we obviously need to operate by the same rules as everyone else.

Safeguarding (Doc here)

We had almost no time to discuss this one but it's very important. Squash has had its share of safeguarding issues and all the official bodies and people involved (and that means the committee, coaches, clubs, etc.) all need to know what the requirements and processes are. Having a county safeguarding officer is vital to us because from April 2019 in order to continue receiving the enhanced rebate we must have (a) a County Safeguarding Officer who has been on an approved Safeguarding Course and (b) a Safeguarding Policy. The enhanced rebate is also going to be increased next year so this is now an urgent need for the County.  Seamus will be publishing details of this in due course.

Innovation (Doc here)

This was looking into developments in technology and/or anything we can do to make the game more appealing to those looking in at it. The old white box we play in is a bit dull. Have a look at the doc for a few ideas but they're all a bit expensive. Also have a look at the interactive squash videos from the youth Olympics. More importantly what ES are looking for are new creative ideas that may or may not involve technology – new types of social gatherings with squash/racketball involved – the newly introduced Business Squash Tournament the County ran at the start of this month is an example.

Those present felt that the new format of the Council Meeting was big improvement on previous ones.  People felt they would rather spend more time on fewer topics than trying to get through too much.

• The CAN meeting (Website here). CAN is the County Associations Network and is made up of all the counties - the same group who attend the ES council meetings each time. It's an important group because it represents the collective view of the grass roots squash rather than being 38 individual counties which is what council is. It serves a number of purposes:
  
  • Sharing best practise between the counties
  • Representing grass roots squash as a whole to ES
  • Raising issues or ideas from grass roots to ES
  • Providing consultants to ES in key areas such as; participation, membership, IT, coaching, junior development, etc. 

The CAN meeting spent much of the time discussing how we felt about the ES council meeting and making sure the main points raised were going to be listened to. We also talked a bit about the role of the CAN consultant because it's important that their feedback to ES is the collective opinion from the counties as a whole and not just their own view (which has happened a couple of times) and that it is anonymous allowing the counties to speak their mind freely.  Richard is a member of the CAN Executive and is the IT Consultant.

Seamus will be meeting with a representative of ES on Monday 3^rd December to discuss many of the issues facing the County.  If you would like him to raise anything with the ES representative, please let him know via email at [email protected]